AMiRo-OS

AMiRo-OS is the operating system for the base version of the Autonomous Mini

Robot (AMiRo) [1]. It utilizes ChibiOS (a real-time operating system for

embedded devices developed by Giovanni di Sirio; see <http://chibios.org>) as

system kernel and extends it with platform specific functionalities.

Copyright (C) 2016..2017  Thomas Schöpping et al.

 [1] S. Herbrechtsmeier, T. Korthals, T. Schopping and U. Rückert, "AMiRo: A

     modular & customizable open-source mini robot platform," 2016 20th

     International Conference on System Theory, Control and Computing (ICSTCC),

     Sinaia, 2016, pp. 687-692.

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This file will help you to setup all required software on your system, compile

the source code, and flash it to the AMiRo modules.

================================================================================

   1.1  GCC ARM Embedded Toolchain

================================================================================

In order to compile the source code, you need to install the GCC for ARM

embedded devices. Since AMiRo-OS requires ChibiOS as system kernel, you need a

copy of that project as well. Furthermore, AMiRo-OS requires a compatible

bootloader, such as provided by the AMiRo-BLT project.

1.1 GCC ARM Embedded Toolchain

------------------------------

<https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded>. It is highly recommended to use the

version 4.8 with update 2014-q1 since some others will cause issues. For

installation of the compiler toolchain, please follow the instructions that can

be found on the web page.

-----------

Since AMiRo-OS uses ChibiOS as underlying system kernel, you need to acquire a

copy of it as well. First, go to the directory which contains the AMiRo-OS

folder (but do not go into the AMiRo-OS directory itself!). Now clone the GIT

repository of ChibiOS and checkout version 2.6.x:

It is highly recommended to use exactly this commit. Although newer commits in

the 2.6.x branch might work fine, AMiRo-OS is not compatible with ChibiOS

version 3 or newer.

AMiRo-OS comes with some patches to ChibiOS, which must be applied as well

before compiling the project. Therefore you need to copy all files from the

./patches directory of AMiRo-OS to the root directory of ChibiOS. You can then

apply the patches via the following command:

If the files could not be patched successfully, you are probably using an

incompatible version of ChibiOS (try to checkout the correct commit as denoted

above).

-------------

AMiRo-BLT is an additional software project, which is developed in parallel with

AMiRo-OS. If you did not receive a copy of AMiRo-BLT with AMiRo-OS, you can find

all code and documentation at <https://opensource.cit-ec.de/projects/amiro-os>.

Instructions for installation and how to use the software provided by AMiRo-BLT

can be found on the web page or in the project's readme file.

In order to fully use all features of AMiRo-OS it is recommended to install the

'hterm' or 'gtkterm' application for accessing the robot. To ease further

development, this project offers support for the QtCreator IDE.

-----------------------

Depending on your operating system, it is recommended to install 'gtkterm' for

Linux (available in the Ubuntu repositories), or 'hterm' for Windows. For

gtkterm you need to modify the configuration file ~/.gtktermrc (it is generated

automatically when you start the application for the first time) as follows:

---------------

In order to setup QtCreator projects for the three AMiRo base modules, a script

is provided in the directory ./ide/qtcreator/. It is accompanied by an

additional README.txt file, which contains further information.

Each time you modify any part of AMiRo-OS, you need to recompile the whole

project for the according AMiRo module. Therefore you have to use the makefiles

provided in ./devices/<DeviceToRecompile>/ by simply executing 'make' in the

according directory. If you want to compile all modules at once, you can also

use the makefile in the ./devices/ folder.

After compilation, you always have to flash the generated program to the robot.

Therefore you need to install the SerialBoot tool provided by the AMiRo-BLT

project. Furthermore the tool must be accessible globally under the environment

variable 'SERIALBOOT'. You can do this by appending the following line to your

~/.bashrc file:

Similar to the compilation procedure as described above, you can flash either

each module separately, or all modules at once by executing 'make flash' from

the according directory. Note that you must connect the programming cable either

to the DiWheelDrive or the PowerManagement module for flashing the operating

system. All other modules are powered off after reset so that only these two

offer a bootloader that is required for flashing.

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