Sensor's Robot Brains and Notifications

[JonHylands]

If you're using a gumstix, you can use a USB FT232 board like the one I make, and talk to the bus over a virtual serial port at 1.0 Mbps.

- Jon

[Rob]

Am doing, bought one off you.

I'm doing most of my code on my PC talking via the CM5 via serial. As I said in an earlier post I've used a facade + strategy pattern so it should be fairly easy to switch over to your usb board. I got a C# lib off this forum for the USB FT232.

Once I get the gumstix i'll load CE and port my code over to the compact framework.

I have lots of grand plans but no time! The important thing is that I am learning a lot and having fun. Just have to manage the girlfriend though she calls my bioloid "The other girlfriend" lol.

[Robo1]

Hi all

Good thread. Just to through my 50 cent in. I'm using a gumstix to do the high level stuff, like what to do next and to store all the gaits. Then I've attached it to a FPGA. This gives me the advantage of off loading all the sensor/activators in/out from the gumstix.

I have also off loaded some very simple equations to the FPGA, like taking the gyro and acc to modify the servo position to maintain balance. Using the FPGA means I can split the servos into 4 separate bus so that I can poll them at a high frequency.

Bren

[Rob]

Hi Bren,

I have ages to go before I get to where you and Jon are at.

What particular FPGA do you use?

Could you point me towards some documentation for equations on balance?

Good idea with the separate bus makes it easy separating the sensors and the actuators so you can filter out the trivial sensor poll responses from the important ones then send those to the gumstix for processing. I imagine with all the sensors and polling there is a lot of white sensor noise.

Rob

[Robo1]

Hi Rob

I use Opal Kelly for the FPGA. I'm not that fare into my research I'm trying to get every thing working. For the balance equation I use a simple multiplier (sensor * X) * position. I've just keep X low around the 0.01 and at the moment just for the hips and ankles. I need to get the whole system more together before I can start to properly play around with this aspect of bipeds at the moment I only used it to test that the system was working. still have to make it a bit more refined. And make a proper board most of the system is still in a bread board.

Bren

[JonHylands]

You can run separate buses on the gumstix directly, if you're using FT232 chips - I've plugged in three at the same time, and got ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1, and ttyUSB2 (all virtual serial ports).

- Jon

[Rob]

Cool didn't know you could do that with your board.