DSpace robot controller - Programming

Loading the Arduino software

Download the Arduino dev system from http://www.arduino.cc/ - click 'Download' and choose the appropriate download for your platform. Follow the instructions and unpack and install it.

Installing the robot support software

Download arduino-robot.zip from our web site

find out where your arduino software was installed (Linux users can install these files in a ~/arduino directory - the places your sketches will be installed) - look in the 'arduino' directory - you'll see 'hardware' and 'libraries' directories - unpack this zip file into this directory - when done correctly you'll see a 'dspace-robot' directory now inside the 'hardware' directory.

Start the Arduino application and choose the menu Tools->Board - there you should see a choice "DSpace robot 2.0" - if not you've probably installed the files in the wrong place - quit the Arduino app and fix the files, they try again.

Connecting to the Robot Board's USB serial connection on Windows

The robot board uses a serial terminal over USB connection to talk to the robot board

Windows users may need a .inf file to get their machine to recognise the USB serial port - here's a windows32 one and a windows64 one - download the appropriate one (or just download both), then (instructions for Vista, other types of Windows systems may vary):

Other flavours of Windows will be subtly different - if anyone wants to contribute instructions for their favourite version please let us know

Linux and Mac users should just find that their device starts working when it is plugged in - we have seen some problems on Macs with VodaPhone's vmodem software that does not play well with others and seems to get confused and think the robot is a modem you may not be able to use it at the same time as other serial USB devices like the DSpace robot that use the USB standard CDC interface

A simple test

Start the arduino software, in the Tools-<Boards directory choose "DSpace Robot 2.0". In Tools-<Serial Port menu choose the serial USB cable you just plugged in

Programming support

We've added a software library page showing our abstraction layer making it easier to use sensors and motors - we highly recommend that you use this to control the robot rather than writing directly to the output ports.