Lynxmotion Tech Support

Hi all,

I hadn’t had a lot of time this weekend so I was surprised to see the amount of activity

Hi Zenta,

Thanks for letting me know how you measured the timing. I was thinking of buying a scoop or logic analyser. A second hand scoop is easy to get for a decent price. Logic analysers are a better measuring tool for this but its hard to get a logic analyser for a good price. But I bought myself a new (second hand) car so this has to wait for a little while

I’m looking forward to see your balance system working in realtime! I bet it look Awesome!!


Hi Psymon,

I want to get the new revision (1.2) ready as soon as possible. But it’s been very busy for the last week and the next one. I’ll try to get it done as soon as possible but I can’t promise anything.

But this doesn’t have to hold you back from using the current version and get the BlueSmirf to work with it. The code is made using subparts, if you’ve got it ready you can easy take it out and put it in the new release. You can find the BlueSmirf Wii code on my project page. You should add some code to read in more buttons since the new version uses more buttons. I’m sure you’ll figure it out by looking at the other buttons.


Hi Kurte,

I used the same tutorial without any problems. The Phoenix tutorial shows the same direction The only thing that I know is that the colours of the wires changed a bit between the current and a older version of the remote. But I’m glad that you’ve got it working!

The min/max angles are not used in the calculations. Just before the positions will be send to the SSC there is a check. The check will limit the position to be sure that the servo wound be forced into a position that is mechanically not possible.

Sounds great! I’m curious to see what will come up. I hope you will share your findings.


That’s the fast way that I’ve used to check them out quickly. The new version (1.2) will have a single gait sub which covers all. More coming up…


Thanks, I’m glad to hear that you enjoy it!!


Hi Umar,

Off course it is possible to work with something else. I think if somebody has got enough time and the necessary resources the can build almost anything!

The Wii version works like this. I connect a Wii remote to my PC using Bluetooth. Then I’ve got a small program that I’ve written myself to read out the data of the wii remote. I convert this data that it can be send using the serial port (BlueSmirf connection). I did add a checksum byte to filter the incorrect frames.

The frame that I use looks like this:
They are all bytes. You can check out the receiver part by looking out at the Wii remote code that I’ve mentioned earlier in this post. You will need to write a program on your pc to convert the keyboard hits to the frame that you can send to the serial port.

If you don’t have any programming skills you can do it the easy way and use hyperterminal. You can send keys using hyperterminal and let the code react on that. This isn’t pretty but it should work…

Xan

Hi pysmon,

I want to control the bot just through the keyboard over bluetooth connection. I am familiar with programing languages, but at the moment I have no idea which direction to start with. Xan mentioned that the data needs to be converted to frames which could then be sent to serial output. Here what does this "frame" represent? Does that corresponds to a SSC-32 like command encrypted in some form? And what methodology to be used to determine the required frames from keyboard key presses?



what is the workflow of that wrapper? Can you plz give some explanation. I hope I could implement it in visual basic.

Thanks a lot,
Umar

Um, well... It's actually figure 8-2 that is blatantly wrong! We are fixing it.

_________________
Jim Frye, the Robot Guy
http://www.lynxmotion.com
I've always tried to do my best...

We've corrected Figure 8-2 - sorry for the error!

_________________
Beth
Lynxmotion, Inc
http://www.lynxmotion.com

THANKS I COULD HELP BRO

Hi Umar



The frame is the same as sending commands to the SCC-32 just the commands are different.
the atom is waiting for a serial string which represents this

[WiiMoteX, WiiMoteY, WiiMoteZ, NunChukX, NunChukY, NunChukZ, JoyX, JoyY, Buttons1, Buttons2 ,Checksum]

haven't fully digested it yet but i think you first need to send [ff] 255 in hex to indicate the start of the frame
followed by the values for the above in hex eg, [00,f1,EE ..etc] then finished with [ff] to complete the frame.

In your own code you could replace WiiMoteX with left right values, wiimMoteY with up down values, etc.
The values for X,Y,Z types would be 0 to 255 with 128 as middle point and the values for buttons are 0 or 1.

No time scale for me to complete anything, suffer from to many projects at once.

Psymon

One minor correction here. The frame format you are referring to, 255 (sync byte), data, data, is for the SSC-32's MiniSSC-II emulator. This method only accepts 3 bytes of data, and does not end in a 255. In fact the SSC-32 actually uses ASCII commands in it's native language. It's not correct to say it's the same as the SSC-32 uses without a little clarification.

_________________
Jim Frye, the Robot Guy
http://www.lynxmotion.com
I've always tried to do my best...

Thanks Jim for the clarification.
Infact that just helped work out why my code didn't work!

Psymon

Congratz with the car!
I also bought a second hand 60 MHz scoop from a friend of mine for very little money. But I would really like to have a logic analyser too!


Sounds like you did it a similar way as I did too. But did you include the 12 step ripple gait too? Looking forward to see your new 1.2 code!

_________________
[b]Kåre Halvorsen, Zenta[/b]
-----------------------------------------
Zenta's blog
http://zentasrobots.com/
Zenta's YouTube channel
http://www.youtube.com/ZentaOlbaid
-----------------------------------------

As I mentioned earlier I first tried the quick and dirty version to integrate his three earlier gaits. I would prefer to have them all in one as well!

I did not spend much time on it yet as I am hoping to integrate with both of your newer stuff (hint). Left on my own, I would probably try to convert all of these gait functions into one table driven function. I have not tried yet as it would probably seriously change the code and this is your code which I appreciate very much.

To make this type of changes I would probably start off changing all of the individual variables (XXGatePos(XYZ) into arrays.

Looking through your functions, I would probably generate a table of values for each step of the gait. First guess is I would make the table with one nibble per each direction(x,y,z) of each leg per step. That would give me 16 different possible things I could do to each: Nothing, set zero, +X, -X, +x/2, -x/2, +x/4, -x/4...) and see if I could reduce all of the logic down to something like this... Obviously if 16 different movements are not enough we could easily expand this...

But for now I will wait (and hope) to see your updated versions soon! (Please)

Kurt

But for now I will wait to see

As I mentioned on Sunday, I went ahead and made a version of this that works with the Hitec Laser 6 receiver. I have the receiver connected to IO pins p0-p5 on the BB2. This version uses the Gear up/down switch to go between walking and/or body move/rotate modes. I use the Aux switch in walk mode to choose which gait. In Body mode it switchs between move and rotate modes. The height of the body is controlled by the Left hand joystick.

The code appears to be working reasonably well. I did need to add a little deadzone to the control to keep it from wanting to walk in place. I also updated the IN/OUT code to work on the BB2 now that PS2 controller is not on the same IO pins.

For now I think I am done. I will hold off until the next versions of the official code comes out.

Kurt

Hi All,

I’m sorry to say that the new version of the code have to wait for another week or two. I’m very busy right now and it seems like I don’t have free (read robotic) time this week. But it looks like next week will be a “normalâ€

Jim?

Hi Kurt,



Great work! As far as I know you're the first one using this code on a round hex! Glad it is working!!

Sorry that I'll keep you waiting for the new version... I'll hope to help you out as soon as possible.

Xan

Thank you. It was fun getting my Hex to work again. It has also been fun making it work using the Laser 6 receiver:

Just in case anyone with a phoenix wishes to do it, here is some of the changes I made to your code to make it work:

I added some definitions just under where you defined the PS2 defs


I also added a new subroutine, that I call instead of your PS2Input function. It started off with some of Zenta's earlier code:


This code could easily be tweaked some. I used the other two channels to allow me to choose the three gates and to be able to do body rotations or movement as well as walking.

I am looking forward to seeing your newer version. It would be great if we could integrate everything into one version, that maybe a few #ifdefs and a few #defines we could build it for the different versions of hexs (including different leg types) as well as for different input devices.

Kurt

I received it today. It will be uploaded early this week!

_________________
Jim Frye, the Robot Guy
http://www.lynxmotion.com
I've always tried to do my best...