Yep have been thinking about ordering one as well. Probably will. But also wondering about rolling your own. That is could maybe use an Arduino Leonardo or an Arduino Micro which has the Atmega328u4 processor which I believe gives us hardware USB plus a hardware serial port. So could plug plug the USB into the Pi and then connect D0/D1 to each other and use the hardware serial port, connect a lead to an Robotis cable, and connect the other two wires to the + and - of the Lipo (plus the minus should go bck to processor as well). Then Simply plug the plug of the cable into a 4 connection hub… Or something like that…
Zenta: yep would be sort-of like the Orion, although not sure if it would be compatible with the Orion Servos. Just Skyped with Nathan and he says that the Arc32 does have support for the Orion Servos, so may try this as it would be fun to try enabling the feedback and seeing if it works.
As for the command line interface I am very rusty on it. But I am limping along:
As for finding information, I do a lot of internet searches. I also look at the man pages…
On example web site that I have searched a lot is: linux.die.net/man/
On the Pi you can use the “man” command to get manual pages as well. Also if you know a command, most of them allow you to find out more about the command by typing in the argument --help
sometimes where you add the --help
changes what type of help you get.
For example: udevadm --help
Will probably just tell you about the different sub commands that there is, which include info
But typeing: udevadm info --help
Will now tell you different options you have for info.
Also you can type: help
at the command prompt and get an idea of the built-in commands. But does not include everything like: ls
Likewise: man bash
Will give you more details about the bash shell (The default command prompt shell is bash).
Some of the commands I use a lot include:
ls : Lists the contents of a directory (or a file pattern, like: "ls .h" will list all header files. There are several options I use like -l
cd : Change Directory. It is relative to where you are currently unless you give some absolute location to go to. Examples:
cd ~ : Takes you back to your home directory
cd Desktop : changes to the sub directory Desktop (assuming there is one). Also you can sometimes get away with cd D
cd /dev : changes to the absolute location /dev
cp : copy files
mv: Move files (also used to rename a file
rm: Remove files
pwd: Print working directory
grep: Used to search files for stuff
sudo: used to run a command as the supervisor. Needed for some commands or to write to certain locations, examples:
sudo shutdown -r now : tells the system to a shutdown with a restart and do it now. Substitute -h for -r does a halt
sudo cp 99-usb-serial.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
Got to go, Hope that helps.
Kurt
. Need to do some more UI work to figure out what I was doing to set the robot height… Also next up may be to port over the DIY XBee code so I can use one of my remotes instead…
I wish I had a logic analyzer like you mentioned… Hopefully there is something simple I’ve just missed. I added in the error reporting code from the SDK last night but is was getting late so I didn’t get the bot setup to test. It should tell me what’s going on. Check out what it can report.