[etherlab-users] "Dancing" robot base using ethercat

[Uwe Hermann]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 03:35:50PM +0100, Florian Pose wrote:
> Hi Uwe,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 03:01:27PM +0100, Uwe Hermann wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 01:22:29PM +0900, Hobin Yoon wrote:
> > > It is quite interesting. Could you give us some more details on how you
> > > invoked 'ethercat'? Because 'ethercat' doesn't seem to provide PDO mapping
> > > and data writing to domain.
> > 
> > Yeah, we're hardcoding certain "commands" to the four slaves, e.g. like this:
> > sudo $E download -p 2 --type int16 0x6042 0 0
> > sudo $E download -p 3 --type int16 0x6042 0 0
> > ...
> 
> this is really crazy! ;-)

Thanks :)

 
> You know that you can do this much easier and without delay through the
> application interface?

Sure, this is just a quick hack. I'm now working on a small C code for
controlling the robot (basically a stripped-down 'ethercat' tool).
The longer-term goal is to hook something like that up to a higher-level
robotics system such as Player or YARP:

http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/
http://eris.liralab.it/yarp/

I guess for that we basically merely need to call a few functions from the
library in lib/.

Is that what you meant with "application interface" or do you suggest to
use an extra kernel module (which I'd like to avoid if possible, staying in
userspace is a lot simpler in many respects).


Cheers, Uwe.
-- 
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