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003_Arduino.md

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How to setup your Arduino

Regular Workflow

In order to have your brain program communicate with the Arduino you'll need to:

  • Connect Arduino to your laptop with the USB Cable
  • Using Arduino IDE, open the program you want to load (currently we use this one), and upload it to the Arduino
  • while you are adding it, you can use
$ ./do_savearduinohex.sh 000_sensors

to make a copy of the .hex file into the related folder (useful for manual installation)

  • Disconnect the Arduino and connect it to the Raspberry pi, using the same USB cable.
  • Once the Raspberry boots, the arduino will boot too

Notes on writing programs

Communication from Arduino to Raspberry occurs through messages on the Serial.

  • There are three types of messages; actions, metrics and the rest, which should just be used as logs
    • Action messages start with "ACTION: "
      • The rest of the message contains the trigger that will make brain take an action.
      • If you want your robot to do something, configure an entry on brain/cfg.yaml(copy and paste is your friend), and make your program send something like:
    delay(50);
    Serial.println("ACTION: talk_dirty");
  • Metrics messages start with "SENSOR: data_"
    • The full message looks like "SENSOR: data_distance_20", where distance is a sensor brain recognizes and 20 is the value we got from that sensor.
    • The arduino part of sending that message looks like:
    delay(50);
    Serial.print("SENSOR: data_distance_");
    Serial.println(dist); # dist is defined previously and stores values directly from your sensor.
  • Information ones start with "LOG: "
  • As you have seen on the examples above, we need to have a delay(50) (or more than 50) between two println commands, to allow brain to read both in two separate tries.

Trick: Bootloader recovery

IF you ever have your Arduino Bootloader messed up (Symptom: the Arduino IDE throws "not in sync" errors), you can use the Raspberry to recover it.

You'll need to setup the ICSP connection between both as follows:

ICSP connection

After that, you'll need avrdude to be installed and configured on the Raspberry. For that follow Raspberry's own setup docs.

Challenges

Nothing so far

PREV: Preparing the Raspberry <-- --> NEXT: Build a Chassis