Lichtblick

Lichtblick is an integrated visualization and diagnosis tool for robotics, available in your browser or as a desktop app on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

🚀 Try Lichtblick

Try Lichtblick now in your browser!

No installation required - experience the full power of Lichtblick directly in your web browser!

📖 Documentation

Looking for guidance on using Lichtblick? Check out our official documentation here!

We are actively updating our documentation with new features, stay tunned! 🚀

📡 Telemetry

Lichtblick includes an opt-in, privacy-respecting OpenTelemetry integration used to understand how the app is used (e.g. which menu actions or panel types people interact with) and to help detect performance regressions.

• Off by default. Telemetry is only active if the specific build you're running was compiled with an OTLP collector endpoint (OTLP_ENDPOINT at build time). Official public builds do not enable this unless explicitly configured — if no endpoint is compiled in, nothing is ever collected or sent, and there is no runtime toggle to turn it on.
• No PII. Only anonymous, randomly-generated device/session identifiers are attached to events — no user accounts, file contents, message data, or personally identifiable information is ever captured.
• Bounded, named events only. Only a fixed, closed set of named UI interaction events (see AppEvent) can be emitted — e.g. layout selection/creation, panel add/remove, app menu clicks — as OpenTelemetry logs and traces. There is no free-form event capture and no keystroke/input logging.
• Rate-limited. A token-bucket rate limiter bounds how much telemetry any single session can emit.

If you're building your own distribution and want to enable it, set OTLP_ENDPOINT in your .env file — the app will export OTLP/HTTP logs and traces to ${OTLP_ENDPOINT}/v1/logs and ${OTLP_ENDPOINT}/v1/traces.

Dependencies:

• Node.js v16.10+

---

🚀 Getting started

🐳 From Docker

To run lichtblick via docker you can run:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/lichtblick-suite/lichtblick:latest

And open in your browser: http://localhost:8080/

📑 From source code

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/lichtblick-suite/lichtblick.git

Enable corepack:

$ corepack enable

Install packages from package.json:

$ yarn install

• If you still get errors about corepack after running corepack enable, try uninstalling and reinstalling Node.js. Ensure that Yarn is not separately installed from another source, but is installed via corepack.

Launch the development environment:

# To launch the desktop app (run scripts in different terminals):
$ yarn desktop:serve        # start webpack dev server
$ yarn desktop:start        # launch electron (make sure the desktop:serve finished to build)

# To launch the web app:
$ yarn run web:serve        # it will be avaiable in http://localhost:8080

⚠️ Ubuntu users: the application may present some issues using GPU. In order to bypass the GPU and process it using directly the CPU (software), please run lichtblick using the variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE set to 1:

$ LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 yarn desktop:start

🛠️ Building Lichtblick

Build the application for production using these commands:

# To build the desktop apps:
$ yarn run desktop:build:prod   # compile necessary files

- yarn run package:win         # Package for windows
- yarn run package:darwin      # Package for macOS
- yarn run package:linux       # Package for linux

# To build the web app:
$ yarn run web:build:prod

# To build and run the web app using docker:
$ docker build . -t lichtblick
$ docker run -p 8080:8080 lichtblick

# It is possible to clean up build files using the following command:
$ yarn run clean

• The desktop builds are located in the dist directory, and the web builds are found in the web/.webpack directory.

⚠️ Note on Linux dependencies (.tar.gz only)

When installing the .tar.gz package, unlike the .deb, system dependencies are not installed automatically. In many cases, if you already have Google Chrome or another Chromium-based application installed, Lichtblick will run fine since these applications bring most of the required libraries.

However, if you see errors about missing libraries when launching Lichtblick, you will need to install them manually. The most common missing dependencies are:

• libgtk-3-0
• libatk1.0-0
• libatk-bridge2.0-0
• libatspi2.0-0
• libnss3
• libnspr4
• libasound2
• libcups2
• libnotify4
• libxtst6
• xdg-utils
• libdrm2
• libgbm1
• libxcb-dri3-0

Example (Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-0 libatk1.0-0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatspi2.0-0 libnss3 libnspr4 libasound2 libcups2 libnotify4 libxtst6 xdg-utils libdrm2 libgbm1 libxcb-dri3-0

👉 Recommendation: if using the .tar.gz, always check the error messages in the terminal. They will indicate which library is missing so you can install it manually.

📝 License (Open Source)

Lichtblick follows an open core licensing model. Most functionality is available in this repository, and can be reproduced or modified per the terms of the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Lichtblick is primarily built in TypeScript and ReactJS. All potential contributors must agree to the Contributor License Agreement outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md.

⭐ Credits

Lichtblick originally began as a fork of Foxglove Studio, an open-source project developed by Foxglove.