HeartToHeart 4 version 1.1.0 English Patch (OLD)
by ks_khr3
Sat Jul 03, 2010 4:07 pm
Yup. Making good use of the JumpMotion concept already. Pity you have to find-out many things by trial & error. Just managed to expand my "greet if you are nearby" motion with a call to the "GetUp If on the floor" motion so now it gets up without me having to trigger the motion.
By the way, I converted all servo names in the configuration to English and saved all motions with English names in the Hello project. If this is of value to others I'd be happy to contribute.
By the way, I converted all servo names in the configuration to English and saved all motions with English names in the Hello project. If this is of value to others I'd be happy to contribute.
by ks_khr3
Sat Jul 03, 2010 4:16 pm
Chris, thanks so much for responding to my endless questions. You're amazing!
Few quick ones.
How do you interface the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS to the Kondo RCV4?
If I'm understanding this right you program your motions and store them into the RCV-4's 50 slots and then trigger them as & when required using the C based algorithms running on the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS. Is that an accurate understanding?
Do you feedback any data from the RCV-4 back to the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS such as gyro data etc?
Thanks so much for writing. Have a good weekend.
Few quick ones.
How do you interface the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS to the Kondo RCV4?
If I'm understanding this right you program your motions and store them into the RCV-4's 50 slots and then trigger them as & when required using the C based algorithms running on the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS. Is that an accurate understanding?
Do you feedback any data from the RCV-4 back to the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS such as gyro data etc?
Thanks so much for writing. Have a good weekend.
by chrisvo
Sat Jul 03, 2010 4:35 pm
How do you interface the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS to the Kondo RCV4?
Serial UART. The SRV-1 has a UART port and then there's a small circuit you will need to invert the signal level before it comes into the RCB-4 -- we used a CD74HC00E (NAND) chip because we had them laying around but you can probably use a CD74HC04E (Inverter) instead. These particular chips work mostly because they are tolerant of both 5V and 3.3V logic.
To hook up the two SRV-1 boards and the RCB-4 we made a small motherboard:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophe ... 081021455/
This motherboard is a terrible design and we want to make a lot of changes for next year based on the trouble with this year's design. We are also considering making an entirely new board to completely replace the RCB-4, but these plans are not solid yet.
If I'm understanding this right you program your motions and store them into the RCV-4's 50 slots and then trigger them as & when required using the C based algorithms running on the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS. Is that an accurate understanding?
Yes. There are several ways to run motions:
1. You can just run the motion from the slot. Simple enough.
2. In libkondo4, we have also made it possible to emulate a KRC button press (the kondo remote control) on the RCB-4, which can be used in many ways in the motions. We use these to do arbitrarily long motions like walking, sidesteps, etc. For example, you can have the robot to keep walking until you let go of the button. There are many more possibilities for this, as the KRC also has the ability to send analog direction pad information (like you could have your robot walk faster or slower, or curve to the side when it walks, etc).
3. In libkondo4, you can set a counter first, which can then be used by the motion. For example, we have a walk motion which will walk N steps. To walk 3 steps, we set the counter C1 to 3, then run the motion.
Do you feedback any data from the RCV-4 back to the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS such as gyro data etc?
Yes. We do not have A/D converters on the SRV-1 so we plug our accelerometers into the RCB-4 and use libkondo4 to query the accelerometer values. We use it that way because when the robot falls down, the RoboCup gameplay software also has to know it fell to reset it's algorithm.
You can also use libkondo4 to query any AD port on the robot, query battery status, or set/unset any PIO. I recently added the ability to query servo data too, but I don't know all the fields. You can get position right now, but supposedly there's more information like temperature, etc that you can query from the servos.
We use the gyro for a small amount of stabilization as directed by Kondo. It works OK but nothing to write home about.
by ks_khr3
Sat Jul 03, 2010 4:45 pm
That's just amazing. You make it sound so easy! What would you recommend for someone like me with no PCB making facilities & circuit design skills? I'm looking at an off the shelf solution to do this type of stuff. Problem now seems to be the growing abundance of boards that "can" do what we need but lacking integration off the shelf.
by chrisvo
Sat Jul 03, 2010 5:00 pm
To be honest we don't know anything about circuit design except the very basics. We downloaded a program called EAGLE which is a pretty well known program for PCB layout, and we started with the EAGLE reference design provided by Surveyor for their existing SVS board.
We had already tested the additional circuits on a breadboard and we basically just drew the circuits up in EAGLE and sent the finished designs to a PCB fabrication shop in China. We then soldered the components on the boards ourselves.
It worked the first time, but we made a lot of mistakes in the design which we hope to correct in our next design.
We had already tested the additional circuits on a breadboard and we basically just drew the circuits up in EAGLE and sent the finished designs to a PCB fabrication shop in China. We then soldered the components on the boards ourselves.
It worked the first time, but we made a lot of mistakes in the design which we hope to correct in our next design.
by chrisvo
Sat Jul 03, 2010 5:03 pm
By the way if you are looking for an inexpensive PCB manufacturing and assembly service try this one: http://www.goldphoenixpcb.biz/
You can probably find a service local to you, but I find that I get the best price from these Chinese companies.
You can probably find a service local to you, but I find that I get the best price from these Chinese companies.
by ks_khr3
Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:03 pm
Great pointers!!! Thanks much!
Was looking for some IR seeker pointers and came up with the following interesting link :
http://kondo-robot.com/sys/archives/cat ... kcb-sensor
specifically note the link to C code. Inside it there is a reference such as ...
This file is generated by Renesas Project Generator (Ver.4.
.
I will look into this. Does it mean I can write & run C code right on the RCV4? I hope so.
Was looking for some IR seeker pointers and came up with the following interesting link :
http://kondo-robot.com/sys/archives/cat ... kcb-sensor
specifically note the link to C code. Inside it there is a reference such as ...
This file is generated by Renesas Project Generator (Ver.4.
.
I will look into this. Does it mean I can write & run C code right on the RCV4? I hope so.
by chrisvo
Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:08 pm
The KCB-1 is a different product. We have one here in the lab. It's meant as an add-on for the RCB-4. With it you can plug in some sensors and do some autonomous things.
My true wish is that the RCB-4 firmware were open source, so we could put our own software on it. Other servo makers such as Robotis open up their platform with great success; the research community loves their servos.
My true wish is that the RCB-4 firmware were open source, so we could put our own software on it. Other servo makers such as Robotis open up their platform with great success; the research community loves their servos.
by chrisvo
Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:20 pm
Oh, it certainly should be possible to re flash the RCB-4.
But the problem is more that Kondo has not released the firmware source code for the RCB-4. You'd have to write entirely brand new firmware to do things like run motions, communicate with Heart2Heart, etc.
If we had the source code we could retain all the existing functionality and add just the modifications we need...
But the problem is more that Kondo has not released the firmware source code for the RCB-4. You'd have to write entirely brand new firmware to do things like run motions, communicate with Heart2Heart, etc.
If we had the source code we could retain all the existing functionality and add just the modifications we need...
by ks_khr3
Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:31 pm
http://www.kondo-robot.com/guide/kcb-1/?p=30
Check out the pdf on the sdk usage. Looks really sweet.
Check out the pdf on the sdk usage. Looks really sweet.
by ks_khr3
Mon Jul 05, 2010 5:29 am
Had a brief email exchange with IXS. They are recommending I look at the new KCB-3WL that is soon to be released (slightly delayed). Advantage of this board would be the ready integration with RCV-4 and that it runs Linux out of the box. Should be easy to make it run English Linux and use the samples that will be provided to drive autonomous behavior.
On the flip side, I like the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS because for the same price it gives you a very well constructed base with 2 cameras. Tough decision.
On the flip side, I like the Surveyor SRV-1 SVS because for the same price it gives you a very well constructed base with 2 cameras. Tough decision.
by chrisvo
Mon Jul 05, 2010 5:56 am
Yes, the KCB-3WL is interesting, but I am wondering whether it actually does the image processing on-board. From my understanding, the image processing is done offline on a laptop because the processor on board the KCB-3WL is not powerful enough.
The SRV-1 SVS gives you two 500 MHz ADI Blackfin BF537 processors with DSP capability so you can do reasonably powerful processing. The current firmware is not Linux based though, it is bare-metal C. The firmware code is very simple and easy to modify and compile, but they do not use interrupts, buffered UART, or multitasking in the given firmware, which can cause some challenges (or could be a good thing, because that's simpler and more deterministic). There are ways around all of these challenges, with third-party code and support from the forums. WiFi is provided on SRV-1 by means of a Lantronix Matchport b/g, which is basically a serial-to-wifi bridge.
They are also recently working on bringing Linux on the SRV-1 up to date:
http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Y ... 1276379812
We are looking for a good board to replace the RCB-4 to make a better integration with the SRV-1 SVS and enable us to do better closed-loop sensor feedback for motions -- we have looked at the RoBoard, RM-Board2 (a pretty powerful board from IXS that nobody seems to know much about), Gumstix, and some others. Gumstix is promising, we have used it before in the past, but integration might be difficult on the electronics side for us. RM-Board2 looks nice, is very small, and seems like it would integrate perfectly with 3HV (it has been used before for the 3HV) but there's very little information online about it. Maybe you can ask IXS about it? It's shown on IXS web site:
http://www.ixs.co.jp/en/products/robot/SSLH.html
The SRV-1 SVS gives you two 500 MHz ADI Blackfin BF537 processors with DSP capability so you can do reasonably powerful processing. The current firmware is not Linux based though, it is bare-metal C. The firmware code is very simple and easy to modify and compile, but they do not use interrupts, buffered UART, or multitasking in the given firmware, which can cause some challenges (or could be a good thing, because that's simpler and more deterministic). There are ways around all of these challenges, with third-party code and support from the forums. WiFi is provided on SRV-1 by means of a Lantronix Matchport b/g, which is basically a serial-to-wifi bridge.
They are also recently working on bringing Linux on the SRV-1 up to date:
http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/Y ... 1276379812
We are looking for a good board to replace the RCB-4 to make a better integration with the SRV-1 SVS and enable us to do better closed-loop sensor feedback for motions -- we have looked at the RoBoard, RM-Board2 (a pretty powerful board from IXS that nobody seems to know much about), Gumstix, and some others. Gumstix is promising, we have used it before in the past, but integration might be difficult on the electronics side for us. RM-Board2 looks nice, is very small, and seems like it would integrate perfectly with 3HV (it has been used before for the 3HV) but there's very little information online about it. Maybe you can ask IXS about it? It's shown on IXS web site:
http://www.ixs.co.jp/en/products/robot/SSLH.html
by ks_khr3
Mon Jul 05, 2010 6:05 am
Thanks for that summary. Saves me a lot of legwork. All said, SRV-1 SVS seems like the best bang for buck product at the moment.
I did ask IXS about RM-board when I was there and they sort of brushed my question aside saying its a very high end product meant more for the academic researchers (which means you qualify!). They said a more consumer focused product is about to be released and they were referring to the KCB-3WL.
I asked about KCB-3WLs onboard image processing capability and they said it is limited. They said it can do some but limited.
At that time I was there with a broken KHR-3, burnt servos, total noob posture so I didn't push the matter. I can take it up again with them since we seem to have gone beyond those initial issues. I am trying to get a date from them as to when the KCB-3WL is going to be released.
As a side note, I have been using the Lego NXT platform for quite some time and can't help but be impressed with the abundance of sensors, 3rd party hardware and development platforms. Wondering how the NXT brick compares to some of these options. There is a pretty decent camera add-on to NXT from a company called mindsensors which does its own processing onboard.
All the best
I did ask IXS about RM-board when I was there and they sort of brushed my question aside saying its a very high end product meant more for the academic researchers (which means you qualify!). They said a more consumer focused product is about to be released and they were referring to the KCB-3WL.
I asked about KCB-3WLs onboard image processing capability and they said it is limited. They said it can do some but limited.
At that time I was there with a broken KHR-3, burnt servos, total noob posture so I didn't push the matter. I can take it up again with them since we seem to have gone beyond those initial issues. I am trying to get a date from them as to when the KCB-3WL is going to be released.
As a side note, I have been using the Lego NXT platform for quite some time and can't help but be impressed with the abundance of sensors, 3rd party hardware and development platforms. Wondering how the NXT brick compares to some of these options. There is a pretty decent camera add-on to NXT from a company called mindsensors which does its own processing onboard.
All the best