Cannot see "colorful plots" following instruction in "Getting Started" Session

[yijiangh]

Hi everyone,
I'm working on ROS-kinetic (16.04 LTS).

Before I build swri_profiler, I installed and built:

• rosbridge_suite: sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-rosbridge-suite
• node.js (current version), following instruction here
• roslibjs, following instruction here

Then I cloned swri_profiler into my catkin_ws and built it.

I tried to follow instructions in "Getting Started" session:

1. (I don't quite understand the "starting roscore" step)
2. roslaunch swri_profiler testing_example.launch
3. roslaunch swri_profiler.launch
4. Open my web broswer (chrome or firefox), and type http://localhost:8000/ in address bar

Then I got this:

I doubt this shouldn't be the expected result. I'm wondering if anyone can share their "right" outcome or give suggestion to me?

I can successfully check /profiler/data and /profiler/index topics using 'rostopic echo ...' (not launching profiler.launch), indicating that my swri_profiler is working properlly except the web visualizer part.

PS:
It'd be great if we can specify the dependencies in our README, or creating a rosinstall file?

[bromeara]

Disclaimer

I am using the version of swri_profiler from the apt repository and I do not think that we were having the same issue. And Im several years too late but for documentations sake...

The problem(probably)

I believe that this is a routing issue, you can clearly connect to localhost:8000 however in order to display the graphs you also need a connection to localhost:9091 for the websocket as defined in launch/profiler.launch(This is a perma link the port could always change in a new version).
The following will probably not help you since you are already on the machine and should have access to port 9091, my only advice is to see if anything else is using port 9091 or perhaps if building it yourself caused you to somehow restrict the ability to access the localhost from your npm server. IDK networking is weird

My solution to my problem

My personal issue came from accessing the webpage over the network from my laptop, some thing like HTTP://192.168.1.X:8000 . This works for the webpage however I suspect the websocket IP is hardcoded so the HTML page was trying to access WEBSOCKET://localhost:9091 which on my laptop had nothing on it. So you could do two things, go replace the hardcoded IP in the HTML with the 192.168.1.X address. Or my preferred solution since I don't have to change code is to use an ssh config (~/.ssh/config) to port forward mine was as follows.

Host <remote-ros-machine-name>
  Hostname <192.168.1.X>
  User <Remote Username>
  LocalForward 8080 localhost:8000
  LocalForward 9091 localhost:9091
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa # Optional but removes the need for a password if you have key files set up

Then I just ssh into the machine with ssh remote-ros-machine-name and could access the webpage and graphs when I visited HTTP://localhost:8080 on my laptop. (I made the port 8080 on my laptop since it was open but 8000 can work too just change it in the ~/.ssh/config file.)