A Teensy Bioloid bus interface

[billyzelsnack]

The Teensy is fantastic!!

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

It's small. It's cheap. It has built in USB and it has another UART. The USB serial can apparently do 800k bytes/sec too!

Here's what I hacked together so far tonight..

phpBB [media]

If all works out I'll have a super fast link to the bus. On top of that I'll implement a proper buffered virtualdynamixel, control two servos, and have some IO ports as well.

Here's the ( in progress ) source..
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e01a ... e6e4055ae3

[limor]

i've had for a while the AT90USBkey which is the AT90USB demo board from Atmel. Coming from the Atmega8,16,168,128.. background, the addition of the USB interface is welcome. The teensy++ is a bit smaller and cheaper.

[i-Bot]

The Teensy does look good and very fairly priced.

It is a shame the Teensy++ does not use the 1287 as does the AT90USBkey, this has USB host as well. I have just done USB host s/w for bluetooth hid on Arduino using shield from circuits@home, so can support Wiimote and PS3 bluetooth on Mega168 ! Would be easy on 1287.

Saddly RandomMatt is not pushing his AVR32 board, since this chip about the same price and much more powerful. I think he is busy with other things.

[billyzelsnack]

For some reason I thought that the USB host mode was limited. What else could you do with it? If someone wrote a driver could it talk to a usb wifi?

[limor]

there's a guy who maintains a list of drivers for the AT90USB mcu's. doesn't always show up on first google search page results. He will probably know whether there's wifi support there's also the avrfreaks forum.

http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php

[billyzelsnack]

Some progress..

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e01a ... 450a8c1cf1

I can now read and write to the bus! I'm writing the code myself this time and it was a bit scary when I finally tied the RX and TX pins together!

In my usual AX-12 interface troubles I'm still having problems with status return packets. I'm also not doing buffering reads with my own interrupt code. My thinking is that I might be able to get away without it due to the strict ordering in which you communicate with the bus. I hope so since it keeps thinks much simpler.

Still. I think I have enough now to glue together my PC based computer vision stuff and the robot so he should be able to track a ball.

btw. Anyone using this code should be careful as it might break things.

[billyzelsnack]

More progress..

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e01a ... 40558950b4

A bit better, but I still get a lot of errors when doing READDATA instructions. When I comment out my debug printing I get less errors so I'm guessing I'm having a "real-time" issue. I'm thinking that I will have to go ahead and do the interrupt based buffered reads now.

[billyzelsnack]

I got my goal for today done..

phpBB [media]

Tomorrow I am in some drastic need of some code cleanup.

In other news.. I finally ordered the fit-pc2 that's planned for use as the onboard computer.

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/

If all works out I'll strip out the MB and mount it on the robot.
http://www.compulab.co.il/fitpc2/html/f ... asheet.htm
104 x 96 x 23 mm and 90 grams. It'll fit nicely on the front torso.