Hello ros control friends.
I have a issue here that I was looking to get opinions on: strings for command and state interfaces · Issue #3491 · ros-controls/ros2_control · GitHub
Basically it is very common for us to have to read strings from the hardware devices that we support. Software/firmware versions are a big one. Checksums for interlocking, diagnostics and metrics, etc.
I think using `control_msgs/msgs/GenericHardwareStatus` helps in some use cases. But I do feel there are some cases where we’d want the get a string from a device and map it into an existing message (like the battery state serial number).
And in one case over the years at least, we needed to send commands to hardware using formatted strings.
Now the implication of this is real time aspect of ros2_control. Though I feel there are lots of case for our application that isn’t “real time” per se. It just that the data follows the same pathway as everything else and it makes the most sense that it be natively supported in ros2_control.
I’m curious if anyone else has this use case and if there are any existing solution people have come up with.