Controlling AX-12 via Keyboard

[CyberPenguin]

Hi everyone!

I'm a newcomer to robotics and am trying to understand my 'Arbotix Robocontroller Starter Kit' from Trossen Robotics. Currently, I'm finishing a BS in Computer Science, but am woefully ignorant when it comes to hardware.

I would like to use the arrows on my keyboard to wirelessly control a single AX-12 servo motor on the robocontroller through the two Xbees.

Right now, I am able to upload an Arduino program to the Arbotix robocontroller through the ISP programmer that came with the kit. The program moves the AX-12 automatically, but I would like to move it in real time with my keyboard. I also went through the Xbee tutorial on this site. I used the X-CTU software and the 'Xbee Explorer USB' to connect the Xbees to my computer. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the xbee.py files from the Xbee tutorial. The link wasn't working for me.

Any information on how to communicate with the Xbees and the robocontroller, in real time, would be greatly appreciated.

tl;dr
Can I control an AX-12 Servo with my keyboard and the 'Arbotix Robocontroller Starter Kit'?


Thanks for your help!

[darkback2]

Hey cyber penguin...

I got help creating something that doesn't exacly do what you want, but does something similar to what you are looking to do.

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/sh...4430#post44430

It takes keyboard commands and has the arbotix do stuff...I am sure you can figure out how to make it do what you want by looking over the code. i am not positive, but I think the code might need slight modification to work with an arbotix.

Hope this helps.

DB

[tician]

The XBee Explorer should show up on the PC as a plain old serial port (e.g. COM4 on windows or /dev/ttyUSB0 on linux). The PC side software will just be a program in any language you want to connect to the serial port and send whatever you want to the arbotix as a control (press 'w' and send the character 'w' or some other sequence of bytes over the serial port through the XBee to the arbotix which then interprets it and does something).

The arbotix side code will simply read from the UART (generically referred to as a 'serial port' or worse as an 'RS-232 serial port') the XBee is connected to and then do whatever you want with it. The code darkback linked should be a decent base if you don't already have an example using the arbotix pose code (poses in a header file created by pypose.py).

[CyberPenguin]

Thank you for your quick responses!


Using them, I've figured a few things out. I had never used serial communication before, so it took some time to understand. Anyway, here's what I've done for anyone curious:

1. Plugged in the Xbee and Xbee USB Explorer into my computer. On my computer its 'COM6' according to the Device Manager.

2. I installed python and used the following code in the Python GUI:

    >>> import serial
    >>> ser = serial.Serial('COM6', 38400)

3. I then uploaded the following code to the Arbotix robocontroller:

    #include <ax12.h>
    #include <BioloidController.h>

    BioloidController bioloid = BioloidController(1000000);
    int i;
    int val;

    void setup(){
         i = 0;
         val = 0;
         Serial.begin(38400);     // connect to the serial port
    }

    void loop(){
          val = Serial.read();     //read in serial input

           if (val == '1') {        //if '1' move the motor
                 while(i<1024){
                   SetPosition(1,i);
                i = i + 1;
              }
            }
    
            i = 0;
    }

4. I then typed "ser.write('1')" into the python GUI and ... nothing happened.

5. I figured this was because ser.write('1') may not have been seen by the robocontroller, so I wrote the following

    >>>while 1:
           ser.write('1')

Now the motor twitches every so often. It's not much, but it's progress!

Its not perfect yet, but I'm going to continue working on it. Anyway, I wanted the thank you again for your help. Also, any other advice you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Specifically, if you know how to make the servo motor rotate 360 degrees instead of just twitching randomly.

[tician]

Might want to wait a bit between calls to SetPosition(1,i), since the servo can only respond so quickly to incoming packets. You could also try reading the "Moving" register of the servo to be sure you don't attempt to give it a new goal position until it has finished reaching its current goal position. The AX-12 pdf on the trossen shop's site is quite useful and the Robotis support site has more up-to-date info on dynamixel servos (Product Information->Dynamixel->AX-Series). Don't have much experience with python, but the snippet you posted does look correct to my inexperienced eyes.

#include <ax12.h>
#include <BioloidController.h>

BioloidController bioloid = BioloidController(1000000);
int i;
int val;

void setup(){
     i = 0;
     val = 0;
     Serial.begin(38400);     // connect to the serial port
}

void loop(){
    val = Serial.read();     //read in serial input

    if (val == '1') {        //if '1' move the motor
        while(i<1024){
            SetPosition(1,i);
            i = i + 1;
            delay(10);  // just use a delay without reading the moving register
// or
//            while (ax12GetRegister(1, AX_MOVING, 1)) {delay(3);} // delay length probably ok, but may not work
        }
    }
    i = 0;
}

Off topic, but I seem to be having a bit of trouble again with copy+pasting code blocks into the reply text box. Not sure if it is Firefox or not (currently 10.0.2, but had the problem with at least 4 and 5 as well). If I add the close tag before I paste, the tag ends up being behind the pasted text with the last few lines of code inaccessible. If I do not add the close tag until after pasting it seems to work fine unless I want to remove the space between the open tag and the first line of the copied code, at which point it deletes most whitespace (line breaks, tabs, and preceeding spaces). I guess it is somehow grabbing the old code tag when I copy, because copying the code to gedit and then copying that to the text box causes no problems at all.