Warn user when a resource is taking a long time to initialize

[EzraBrooks]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When developing a custom robot, our driver was freezing when connecting to a particular motor. This resulted in the /controller_manager never advertising the services, because the resource manager never marked the components as initialized.

Describe the solution you'd like
We eventually figured out that it was our fault, but it would've been very useful to have the resource manager log a warning indicating that the resources had taken a really long time to start.

[saikishor]

Hello @EzraBrooks!

There are some logs printed in debug mode. Right here : https://github.com/ros-controls/ros2_control/blob/master/hardware_interface%2Fsrc%2Fsystem.cpp#L269-L275. Does this help?

The idea is that each hardware takes its own time to initialize and activate, so most of these are decoupled from read and write cycles.

[christophfroehlich]

Could we add a timeout for the initialization? And add it as a parameter to the hardware_spawner?

[saikishor]

Could we add a timeout for the initialization? And add it as a parameter to the hardware_spawner?

I don't know if we have control over the initialisation time, as we don't spawn in a different thread to account for the time. Could be, but I'm not sure

[EzraBrooks]

If I run into the problem again today, I can try bumping the log level to debug and see if those logs are useful, but this is my last day hands-on with this particular robot and I need to get some other stuff working, so no promises on that front :/

[saikishor]

If I run into the problem again today, I can try bumping the log level to debug and see if those logs are useful, but this is my last day hands-on with this particular robot and I need to get some other stuff working, so no promises on that front :/

Sure. Thank you!

[EzraBrooks]

unfortunately I wasn't able to get around to that test. I do like @christophfroehlich's idea if possible, though