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First session

Your phone is paired with the robot. Time to actually use Scry. Five things to try, in order — each one shows off a different capability.

1. "What's my robot's health?"

In the chat composer at the bottom of the Scry tab, type:

What's my robot's health?

Tap Send. Scry checks the robot and renders a health snapshot — nodes alive, topics publishing, battery if available, the ROS domain, and any recent errors — with a short plain-English summary above it.

The data is live: every answer reflects the robot right now, with no caching. A typical reply takes a second or two.

2. "What topics are publishing?"

What topics are publishing right now?

Scry lists the active topics with their type and publish rate (where it can measure one). Tap a topic to drill into its details.

3. Inspect a single topic

What's on /odom?

If /odom exists, Scry reads a sample message and shows it. For high-frequency topics (IMU, camera, lidar) it reports the publish rate and stability instead of flooding you with messages.

4. Voice input

Tap the microphone icon in the composer (between the + and the send button) and say:

What was the last warning in /rosout?

Release, and the transcript appears in the composer — tap send. Voice is transcribed on your phone; no audio leaves the device. See Voice input.

5. Image attachment

Take a screenshot of an RViz scene, a terminal showing an error, or a photo of the robot. In Scry:

  1. Tap the + icon in the composer.
  2. Choose Gallery (or Take photo to capture a fresh one).
  3. Pick the image — it appears as a chip above the input.
  4. Type a question, e.g. what's wrong in this RViz scene?
  5. Send.

Scry uses your provider's vision model to actually look at the image — great for "the robot is doing something weird and I can't even describe it." This needs a model that supports images; see Choose your AI.

More things to ask

Once you're comfortable, these are the kinds of questions Scry handles well:

  • Why is /cmd_vel not publishing?
  • Plot the IMU acceleration for five seconds.
  • Which nodes are using the most CPU right now?
  • Set max_vel_x on the controller to 0.4 and confirm it took.
  • Alert me if the battery drops below 20%.
  • Which robot in my fleet is missing /scan?

How it flows

Every message follows the same simple loop: you ask, Scry decides what to check, it reads the robot live, and it explains the result. If a step would change the robot — publishing, setting a parameter, calling a service — Scry pauses and asks you to approve it first. Reading is free; acting asks first.

Nothing is cached and nothing routes through a Scry cloud — your phone talks to your AI provider and to your robot directly.

When something breaks

Two places to look, in order:

  1. Read the reply in chat. If Scry says it tried something and got an error, that's the robot's own response — usually a node that crashed or a topic that stopped.
  2. Check the connect on the robot. If you installed it as a service, view its log with journalctl --user -u scry-connect -f.

You can also flag a reply with the thumbs-down icon, or send a note from Settings → Feedback — see Sending feedback.

What's next

  • Use Scry — the full feature tour: monitors, fleet view, multi-robot, and connecting remotely.
  • How Scry works — what the phone and the robot each do, and why there's no cloud backend.
  • What Scry can do — everything Scry can inspect and act on, on a robot.