returning newbie

[careyg]

Hi Folks,

So... I bought myself a RoboBuilder kit back when RoboSavvy first listed them. Built Huno, and played a little with motion builder/action builder, and then... a number of things in life took over, and the poor guy has been back in his box for what must be getting on for two years.

Given the time I bought, he's a basic kit (black, no lights), with the free distance sensor head provided, no acceleration sensor, no bluetooth.

With the misses about to go away to visit her family for a couple of weeks, I've got a fair chunk of free evenings coming up, so planning on blowing the cobwebs off, and trying again.

To those ends, just picked up a USB to Serial Port cable, as realised I had no RS/232 on the PC these days (madness!), and I understand there's a new firmware to download to the 'bot?

Beyond that, would appear from these forums that there's been a massive amount of development, which is great too see, with a number of custom roms, etc by e.g. l3v3rz, which look great.


So - my question then, is where should I start?

I'm historically strong on the coding side (though a few years rusty, job change took me away from day to day coding), covering everything from Basic & Pascal through Perl to C/C++/Java, but have no specifics either on the robot side, nor the low-level side i.e. the ATMEGA chip, etc, in hunos chest.

My brief experience with motion builder, etc, suggests i'm perhaps weak on that end of things..


Ideally, I'd like to be in the position where I can have the little fella moving around and reacting to his environment based on program code I write.

Depending on what works best in this regards, more than happy to use a desktop box as the "brains" whilst the local CPU is slaved to it pushing out the actions.


If people could point me to posts/websites/downloads to read my way through, i'd really appreciate it, and advice on where to start would be grand also.

I suspect, if this "takes off" for me, i'll end up ordering the 3-axis sensor and BT board and digging out the soldering iron to give Huno his first upgrade, but want to make sure I've not "bitten off more than I can chew", and wouldn't be better off either storing him away, or ebaying him off, and starting with something simpler first?


Thanks muchly for your thoughs & advice!

Gavin.

[careyg]

OK, so, we're up and running.

First stop, charge, upgrade to latest "official" firmware and confirm all good via remote & motion builder.

Then, grabbed l3v3rz's excellent "basic" firmware, downloaded that, and Huno is now wandering the room, avoiding the walls, sofa, confused dogs, etc thanks to his distance sensor.

Magic.

Sadly, his battery pack appears a little the worse for wear, he only has a coupla mins untethered, I shall attempt to recover that, else a new one will go on the shopping list.

Next stop will be to grab the free Visual Studio 2010 C#, flash with DCMP and see if i can replicate my basic success in a "real" language. Assuming so, then it'll be shopping time for the 3-asix sensor etc

Grand!

Gav.

[l3v3rz]

Great stuff. If you write any cool programs please share and I'll load them up onto the project site.

The idea behind Basic is to get that 80's micro feel where anyone can have a go at writing some code and get something working quickly and have some fun.

cheers

[careyg]

Of-course, anything I do put together which is "beyond noddy", or useful primer material, i'll throw your way for the googlecode site.

Whilst I'm here (and should, now, be getting ready to hit the train into what appears to be a grey and damp London-town today!) has anyone played with detecting front/back down after a fall without an accelerometer?

I'm wondering whether placing a limb "loose" and them moving the other limb on that body-side one direction, then the other, might allow you to determine which way it needs to get up.

Of-course, detecting a fall as something different to being up against a wall may be, perhaps, more of a challenge sans accelerometer anyway....

[careyg]

Hi Again,

Didn't get much time to play this evening.

Did manage to grab Visual Studio Express (with Basic and C++/C# varieties), and get that installed.

Is your .dll file the right thing to use here (is there a relevant header file to use, or other description of available functions?) or am i going down the wrong path? Anyone have examples of a Visual Studio file which I can leverage off of?

Standing on the shoulders of robo-giants certainly is helpful!

Cheers,

G.

[l3v3rz]

Here's sample code:

Code: Select all

using System;

using RobobuilderLib;

namespace Demo
{
    class Program
    {
        public PCremote p;
        public wckMotion w;
        public int nos = 0;

        public void standup()
        {
            if (nos < 16) return;
            w.PlayPose(1000, 10, wckMotion.basic16, true);
        }

        int countServos(int m)
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < m; i++)
            {
                if (!w.wckReadPos(i))
                {
                    nos = i;
                    return i;
                }
            }
            nos = m;
            return m;
        }

        public bool testServo(int id)
        {
            return w.wckReadPos(id);
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string port = "COM5";
            if (args.Length > 0) port = args[0];

            Program g = new Program();
            g.p = new PCremote(port);
            g.w = new wckMotion(g.p);

            Console.WriteLine("Demo - Port: {0} - {1} servos", port, g.countServos(22));

            if (g.testServo(30))
            {
                Console.WriteLine("DCMP mode assumed");
                g.w.DCMP = true;
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Standard firmware assumed {0}", g.p.readVer());
            }
            g.standup();
        }
    }
}


Screenshot :


Notice you need to add RobobuilderLib.dll in reference section

Download C# VS2005 demo files:
http://robobuilderlib.googlecode.com/files/demo.zip

edit: pasting code seems to have had strange effect, disabling HTML seems to have fixed.

[careyg]

You, sir, are a gent!

I shall have a play tomorrow, and post my success!