Season of KDE: Adding MCAP support to Labplot
This article describes the work done for adding MCAP support to LabPlot as part of the Season of KDE 2024.
Here you can see the result of the project, a MCAP file is recorded in the browser and analyzed using LabPlot!
For the Summer of KDE project I added the capability to LabPlot to import data stored in the MCAP container format. The MCAP container format is the new default storage format for ROS2. The MCAP format is an container format which allows the storage of any encoded data. Well known encoding formats supported by MCAP include Protobuf, Flatbuf and JSON. MCAP comes with a great set of features like storing of attachments, support for compression, the support for multiple channels and topics as well as libraries in a variety of different programming languages. This versatility of MCAP makes it the ideal format to store timestamped robotics data or any other sequence of data which is logged in a sequential manner. For the scope of this project, I aimed to add support for JSON encoded MCAP files into LabPlot. This allows a direct import for analysis and visualization of your data without the need of exporting your existing MCAP files into another format.