Feature Request: ROS Diagnostics

[icolwell-as]

It would be handy if the driver published diagnostic messages.

[novatel-applications-engineering]

@icolwell-as, thank you for this request. Can you please describe what type of status info you would like to be published through the diagnostic package?

[icolwell-as]

Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:

• Publish topic status messages for each requested novatel message/ros topic (diagnostic_updater is useful for this). I believe something similar is already done by the driver and sent to rosout.
• A DiagnosticStatus message that represents the connection to the receiver (if it's connected or not)
• A DiagnosticStatus message for the current solution status, and other pertinent receiver status information like number of satellites tracked, etc.

Might also be a good idea to look at other opensource ROS drivers to get a feel for how they use diagnostics.
https://github.com/ros-drivers
I think a lot of the camera drivers use diagnostics.

[novatel-applications-engineering]

Thank you @icolwell-as, we're looking in to this possibly being added to our next release of this driver.

[Timple]

For us it would be useful to see IF rtcm data is flowing in. And IF this rtcm data is successfully applied.
This would be typical data for a diagnostics item.

[MCFurry]

It would also be really helpful if the status field of the NavSatFix message (/gps/fix) would be populated. This field is of type NavSatStatus and hence resembles the fix-status and gnss-services in use.
At this moment it is not and we have to get this information from other Novatel topics.

Edit:
Actually, this is not directly related to diagnostics, so let me make a separate issue for this.