CNXSoft – Embedded Software Development

The Aithon board is a board powered by an STM32 Cortex M4 MCU destined at controlling motors and robotics applications. The board runs Chibios/RT, an open source RTOS, and a set of libraries are also provided to make programming the 2-channel motor driver, and other peripherals/sensors easier.

Here are the specifications of the board:

• MCU – STMicroelectronics STM32F407 ARM Cortex-M4 @ 168 MHz, FPU, 512KB flash and 192KB RAM, up to 17 timers, an RTC, and 12-bit ADC
• I/O (All digital I/Os are 5V tolerant):
  • 15 GPIO
  • 8 ADC inputs and 8 PWM servo outputs
  • Up to 3 USART (one shared with 1 I2C port + XBee)
  • Up to 4 I2C (split between two independent buses)
  • 1 SPI header
  • 1 SWD header
  • 1 12-bit DAC output (shared with SPI SCLK)
• USB – mini-USB (device) and standard USB (host) ports
• Expansion Headers:
  • XBee socket
  • Bluetooth header for optional Roving Networks RN42 module.
  • MicroSD card socket
  • Expansion port for future expansion boards / shields
• 3-axis accelerometer / 3-axis gyroscope with temperature sensor (LSM330DLC)
• 2 channel H-bridge motor driver – 5A per motor (MC33932)
• LCD port with contrast adjustment (16×2 character LCD included)
• Misc- Buzzer with software volume control + 2 push-buttons and 2 software controlled LEDs
• Power Circuitry:
  • 7-24V input with reverse polarity protection and power switch
  • Alternatively, can be powered over USB
  • Optional external servo power (6-24V)
  • 10A 5V switching regulator
  • 5A 3.3V regulator
  • Selectable digital pin power (3.3V or 5V)

You can program the board in C or C++, and it can be programmed via the micro USB port, even over XBee or Bluetooth. There’s no specific IDE for the board. You just write code in your preferred editor, build the program in the command line, and load the binary from there as well. Battery voltage, motor current, motor fault detection, USB host over-current fault and servo power voltage can all be monitored by software. Once the project is ready to ship, it will become fully open hardware with all schematics and library source code available for download.

Aithon Robotics has launched a campaign on Kickstarter to get mass production started. Watch the video below for an overview of the board and its features, and see 2 short demos with a robot collecting and stacking (hockey?) pucks, and some sort of 2 player game.

The lowest pledge ($89) will get you the Aithon board, an LCD display (16×2), and a USB cable, but you can also pledge up to $180 to add a mini USB power adapter (5V/2A), a motor board for 2 extra motors, and the Bluetooth module. The company also has an official website http://aithonboard.com/, but there’s not much information there for now.

On top of announcing its first Linux powered board, Arduino also announced its first official robot at Maker Faire Bay Area called “Arduino Robot”. The robot comes with 2 wheels and  two boards:

• The Motor Board controlling the motors.
• The Control Board reading sensors and deciding how to operate.

Each board, based on Atmel ATmega32u4 MCU, is programmable like any other Arduino board using the Arduino IDE.

Control board specifications:

Control Board (Click to Enlarge)

• MCU – Atmel ATmega32u4 @ 16 MHz with 32KB flash, 2.5KB SRAM, and 1KB EEPROM
• External Storage – 512 Kbit EEPROM (I2C) + SD card reader for FAT16 formatted cards
• Display – Full color LCD over SPI communication
• I/O interfaces:
  • 5x Digital I/O Pins
  • 6x PWM Channels
  • 4x Analog Input Channels  (of the Digital I/O pins)
  • 8x Analog Input Channels (multiplexed)
• Misc – 5 keys keypad, Knob potentiometer attached to analog pin, 8 Ohm speaker, digital compass
• “Playground” – 3x I2C soldering ports, 4x Prototyping areas
• Power – 5V

Motor board specifications:

Motor Board (Click to Enlarge)

• MCU – Atmel ATmega32u4 @ 16 MHz with 32KB flash, 2.5KB SRAM, and 1KB EEPROM
• I/O interfaces:
  • 4x Digital I/O Pins
  • 1x PWM Channels
  • 4x Analog Input Channels (same as the Digital I/O pins)
  • 5 IR line following sensors
• “Playground” – 1x I2C soldering ports, 2x prototyping areas
• Misc – Trimmer for movement calibration
• Power – 5V. Input Voltage 9V to battery charger, AA battery slot four alkaline or NiMh rechargeable batteries.

Hardware, software and documentation are all freely available and open-source. You can power and program it by connecting it to  one of the USB ports of your computer (Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X) . You’ll have to insert 4 rechargeable batteries to use it without computer, as for safety reason, the motors are disabled when it is powered via USB.

The Arduino was available for purchase at the Maker Faire on May 17-19 (but I could not find the price), and will be available to all early July 2013 via Arduino store and the company’s distributors. Further information is available on Arduino Robot page.

Via Atmel Blog and Liliputing

FOSDEM is a 2-day (or 3 if you include Friday beer event) event where over 5,000 members of open source communities meet, share ideas and collaborate. It’s free to attend, and there’s no registration, so you just show up to attend. FOSDEM 2013 takes place on Feb 2-3 (yep, this week-end) in Brussels

There are 7 main tracks where sessions are organized:

• Operating systems
• Open source challenges
• Security Janson
• Beyond operating systems
• Web development
• Miscellaneous
• Robotics

There are also keynotes and devroom for a total of 488 sessions. Developers rooms that may particularly be of interest to readers of this blog are:

• Cross Desktop devroom – e.g. Wayland, gstreamer, razor-qt, Qt Project, Plasma Active, etc…
• Cross Distro devroom – e.g. Linux on Android, suse on ARM, ARMv8, systemd, etc…
• Embedded and mobile devroom – e.g. Baserock Embedded Linux, Guacamayo (Yocto), Nemo Mobile/ Mer project, arduino…

All in all that’s a lot of sessions, and even though I won’t attend, I’m going to select a few from the main tracks:

• Saturday 13:00 – 13:50 – Porting Fedora to 64-bit ARM systems by Jon Masters

This talk introduces the Fedora ARM Project and in particular the work we are doing to bring Fedora to emerging 64-bit ARM server systems.

• Saturday 15:00 – 15:50 – Open ARM GPU drivers by Luc Verhaegen

Where are we today, one year after the unveiling of the Lima driver. This talk will cover the Lima driver (ARM Mali 200/400), but also other open source GPU driver projects such as the freedreno driver (Qualcomm Adreno), open source driver for Nvidia Tegra, etnaviv project (Vivante GC) and cover the status for Broadcoms Videocore and Imaginations PowerVR GPUs.

• Saturday 16:00 – 16:50 – ARM support in the Linux kernel by Thomas Petazzoni

Based on the speaker’s experience of getting the support for the new Armada 370 and Armada XP ARM processors from Marvell into the mainline Linux kernel, this talk will detail the most important steps involved in this effort, and through this, give an overview of those changes and summarize the new rules for ARM Linux support.

• Sunday 11:00 – 11:50 – Firefox OS by Jonas Sicking

Firefox OS is the next product being developed by Mozilla. It’s an open source OS based on the web and following the principals which have made the web a success. A phone running recent builds of Firefox OS (it’s not a finished product yet) will be demoed, and  the technologies and ideas behind Firefox OS will be discussed.

• Sunday 12:00 – 12:50 – systemd, Two Years Later by Lennart Poettering

The systemd project is now two years old (almost three). It found adoption as the core of many big community and commercial Linux distributions. It’s time to look back what we achieved, what we didn’t achieve, how we dealt with the various controversies, and what’s to come next.

• Sunday 12:00 12:50 – Aldebaran Robotics and Open Source by Dimitri Merejkowsky

How Aldebaran Robotics is using open source on their NAO robot.

• Sunday 13:00 – 13:50 – ROS: towards open source in robotics by Morgan Quigley

This talk will provide an overview of the Robot Operating System (ROS), an open software integration framework for robots.

• Sunday 14:00 – 14:50 – Vroom! Free Software in your car by Jeremiah Foster

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and how it has met the challenges along the way.

• Sunday 16:00 – 16:50 – UEFI SecureBoot by Cathy Malmrose

What, why, when, where and how SecureBoot changes the way we build F/LOSS

The LEGO Group has announced LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, a new platform for consumer robotics designed for both younger generation and robotics enthusiasts, at CES 2013. MINDSTORMS system is powered by the new EV3 Intelligent Brick, that comes with more memory (64 MB + 16 MB internal flash memory) and a faster processor (ARM9 @ 300MHz), and runs a Linux-based firmware.

Everstorm

EV3 Intelligent Brick also features an infrared port, a 178×128 LCD interface, a USB host port and SD expansion slot, and is now compatible with iOS and Android for remote control via Bluetooth 2.1. Thanks to 6 buttons present on the EV3, users can now program many functions directly, in addition to the ability to download programs from a desktop computer. Lego claims a simple robot can be built in 20 minutes without having to plug it into a PC. Beside EV3 intelligent brick, the set comes with 550 Lego Technic elements, infrared, color and touch sensors, 3 motors, and a remote control.

LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 will initially include building instructions for 17 different robots such as “Everstorm” a Mohawk-sporting humanoid that shoots mini-spheres as it walks (Pictured above), “Spiker” a scorpion-like robot that searches for an IR beacon “bug” or “Reptar”, a robotic snake that slithers, shakes and strikes. Builders can then add LEGO Technic pieces, motors or sensors to change the functionality of the robot.

Watch the promo video below to see what can be done with Lego Mindstorms EV3.

MINDSTORMS EV3 also provides a new 3D instructions apps (iOS only for now) powered by Autodesk Inventor Publisher that allows builders to zoom in and rotate each step in the building process. The new desktop programming interface is backward compatible to earlier NXT bricks, offering object-oriented programming tools and extensions to major robotics languages, and should be available for Windows and Mac.

LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 will be available for $349.99 US, €349.99 and $399.99 (CAD) in the second half of 2013. You can check out the Brochure for more details.

An education version “The LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 platform” will also be released later this year for educators interested in teaching robotics in middle and high school classrooms. More information on LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 can be found at www.LEGOeducation.us/MINDSTORMS.

Via: Linux.com

Last month, Gumstix announced the TurtleCore expansion board for iRobot Create Programmable Robot, featuring 3 USB ports, several male-header pins with GPIO access, as well as standoffs and screws to support the TurtleCore in the Create cargo bay.. The TurtleCore is a baseboard for TI OMAP3 and Sitara based Overo COMs or Overo STORM series of COMs that replaces the Command Module on iRobot Create to provide a more flexible and powerful solution.

Overo COMs have very good Linux support (OpenEmbedded) with source code, tools and documentation available, including support for the Robot Operating System (GumROS) for high level programming. They released the hardware early so that the community could work on the software, and there have been some good progress as you can see from the video below.

You can already download the schematics and PCB layout file, but the software and instructions do not appear to be available publicly yet.

The TurtleCore is available for $89, Gumstix Overo COMs prices start just above $100, and iRobot Create can be purchased for $130.

Further information can be found on Gumstix TurtleCore page.

Eight computer and electrical engineers built a WiFi Tank (Node.js robot) as part of a senior design project at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts. The robot brain is an EEE PC running Ubuntu, together with an Arduino board and is programmed using node.js. Each tank is equipped with a camera and 2 customized Wi-Fi repeaters (which it can drop it extend range), and it’s targeted at military operations or disaster-affected areas where network infrastructure is not available.

Here are the key characteristics of this robot

• Robot controlled over WiFi
• 102 cm long, 71 cm wide, 41 cm tall, about 68 kg.
• Custom-built (except for treads) out of aluminum
• Range: 1 km with one on-board router and two droppable long-range repeater modules
• Running time: ~12 hours
• On-board webcam with microphone, night vision, pan and tilt
• On-board GPS for location tracking
• Custom-made remote user interface, works on any device with a web browser
• Built with an EEE PC running Ubuntu, Arduino, and Node.js

The EEE PC was installed inside the robot to control all hardware components, and the web interface looks just like the one would would get with an IP webcam, plus one part to control the tank and another to show the tank and repeaters position on the map using GPS.

Here’s what you can do with this web interface:

• Control the robot’s speed and direction using your keyboard’s arrow buttons or the web buttons
• View live webcam footage and control it (including pan/tilt, night vision, and audio)
• Drop WiFi repeater units to extend robot’s range
• View robot and repeater positions in real-time on a map using on-board GPS
• View repeater signal strengths in real-time
• View the status of the interface’s connection to the robot
• Begin replaying the robot’s movements backward if it loses its WiFi connection
• Run over lots of shit

So they installed an EEE PC running Ubuntu inside the tank and ran a node.js web server to handle the user interface and communicate with peripherals.

The developer (Glen Chiacchieri) explains that this robot is written almost exclusively using JavaScript. The source code is available on github,

Watch the video below to see some part of development and how the robot is actually used.

Further details are available on Glen Chiacchieri’s blog.

Willow Garage announces the formation of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), an independent, non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community whose goal is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

The OSRF Board of Directors is composed of the following members:

• Wolfram Burgard. Dr. Burgard, a professor at the University of Freiburg,  heading the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. His major research interests lie in mobile robotics, state estimation and control, as well as artificial intelligence.
• Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and CTO of Clearpath Robotics. Clearpath Robotics is a company specializing in the design and manufacture of unmanned vehicle solutions for industrial R&D.
• Brian Gerkey,  Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage who has worked on the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) since 2008. Dr. Gerkey will be CEO of the OSRF.
• Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks.
• Sam Park, executive vice president of Yujin Robot, a south Korean company designing and manufacturing robots.

The foundation currently sponsors 2 projects:

• Robot Operating System (ROS), a project that provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is licensed under the BSD license.
• Gazebo,  a 3D multi-robot simulator with dynamics. It is capable of simulating articulated robot in complex and realistic environments.

If you want to get involved, the foundation recommends to work on the 2 above projects, although you can also be indirectly involved by working on the Arduino platform and the Make database that are both used in open source robotics projects.

The OSRF will participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge that will start in October 2012 and offers a $2 million prize “to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the DoD’s disaster recovery mission.” The DARPA Robotics Challenge is planned to end in December 2014.

You can find more information on the Open Source Robotics Foundation page.