Custom messages from CodeSys structs: Error parsing ROS_TIME and ROS_DURATION

[2b-t]

Hello, I have been playing around with Robin in CodeSys with an Ubuntu 18.04 runtime system with ROS Melodic for a few days now. Really nice work! A very nice idea indeed to merge the two worlds of ROS and classical PLCs! In particular the generation of custom messages from a CodeSys struct comes in very handy! In this context I have found a small bug with the ROS_TIME and ROS_DURATION data types that only occurs if one tries to assemble a custom message with them. If we define a struct

TYPE TestStruct :
STRUCT
	var_time: ROS_TIME;
END_STRUCT
END_TYPE

and then define a program in structured text that simply writes it to ROS such as

PROGRAM ROS_PRG
VAR_INPUT
	struct_to_ros: TestStruct;
END_VAR
VAR
	robin: Robin;
END_VAR

robin();
robin.write('struct_to_ros', struct_to_ros);

and then call the Python start_update.py script then the script will end with an error

Output:
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * Robin Updater * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Creating SSH key ...

Adding SSH key to agent ...
Identity added: C:\Users\lab\.ssh\robin_key (C:\Users\lab\.ssh\robin_key)

Adding SSH key to target ... Password will be required
[email protected]'s password:
[sudo] password for user: Accessing target through ssh... Ensure ssh service is ON. 
Connecting... 
sa-sha2-512)
warning: agent returned different signature type ssh-rsa (expected rsa-sha2-512)

Generating source code...

Generating new ros package robin_bridge_generated...

Recompiling...
NOTICE: Could not determine the width of the terminal. A default width of 80 will be used. This warning will only be printed once.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Errors << robin_bridge_generated:check /home/user/catkin_ws/logs/robin_bridge_generated/build.check.104.log
CMake Error at /home/user/catkin_ws/build/robin_bridge_generated/cmake/robin_bridge_generated-genmsg.cmake:3 (message):
  Could not find messages which
  '/home/user/catkin_ws/src/robin_bridge_generated/msg/TestStruct.msg'
  depends on.  Did you forget to specify generate_messages(DEPENDENCIES ...)?

  Cannot locate message [time] in package [std_msgs] with paths
  [['/opt/ros/melodic/share/std_msgs/cmake/../msg']]
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  /opt/ros/melodic/share/genmsg/cmake/genmsg-extras.cmake:307 (include)
  CMakeLists.txt:23 (generate_messages)


make: *** [cmake_check_build_system] Error 1
cd /home/user/catkin_ws/build/robin_bridge_generated; catkin build --get-env robin_bridge_generated | catkin env -si  /usr/bin/make cmake_check_build_system; cd -
...............................................................................
Failed << robin_bridge_generated:check           [ Exited with code 2 ]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./updater.py", line 401, in <module>
    Updater().update(catkin_ws=catkin_ws)
  File "./updater.py", line 79, in update
    self._recompile_robin(catkin_ws)
  File "./updater.py", line 296, in _recompile_robin
    raise RuntimeError('Failed to recompile robin_bridge_generated package.')
RuntimeError: Failed to recompile robin_bridge_generated package.

and similarly for the ROS_DURATION data type.

---

Opening the robin/robin_updater/cfg/types.yml file and changing the ROS names to capital letters

66   ROS_TIME:
67       - Time
68       - Time
69       - std_msgs::Time
70   ROS_DURATION:
71       - Duration
72       - Duration
73       - std_msgs::Duration

(so lines 68 and 71 in capital as well) seems to fix it for me.