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.

(a complete list of all authors is given below)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify

it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at

your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but

WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU

General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

This research/work was supported by the Cluster of Excellence

Cognitive Interaction Technology 'CITEC' (EXC 277) at Bielefeld

University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Authors:

 - Thomas Schöpping        <tschoepp[at]cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>

 - Timo Korthals           <tkorthals[at]cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>

 - Stefan Herbechtsmeier   <sherbrec[at]cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>

 - Teerapat Chinapirom     <tchinapirom[at]cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>

 - Robert Abel

 - Marvin Barther

 - Claas Braun

 - Tristan Kenneweg

References:

 [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.

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

CONTENTS:

 1  Required software

   1.1  Git

   1.2  GCC ARM Embedded Toolchain

   1.3  ChibiOS

   1.4  AMiRo-BLT

 2  Recommended software

   2.1  gtkterm and hterm

   2.2  QtCreator

 3  Building and flashing

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

1 - REQUIRED SOFTWARE

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

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 - Git

---------

Since all main- and subprojects are available as Git repositories, installing a

recent version of the tool is mandatory.

1.2 GCC ARM Embedded Toolchain

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

Various versions of the GCC for ARM embedded devices can be found at

<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.

If you are running a 64-bit operating system, you will have to install several

32-bit libraries in order to make the compiler work. The required packages are

libc6, libstdc++6, and libncurses5. You can run the following shell commands to

install the according 32-bit versions of the packages:

  >$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt-get update

  >$ sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libncurses5:i386

1.3 ChibiOS

-----------

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:

  >$ git clone https://github.com/ChibiOS/ChibiOS.git ChibiOS

  >$ cd ChibiOS

  >$ git checkout 2e6dfc7364e7551483922ea6afbaea8f3501ab0e

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:

  >$ for i in `ls | grep patch`; do git am --ignore-space-change --ignore-whitespace < ${i}; done

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).

1.4 AMiRo-BLT

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

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.

2 - RECOMMENDED SOFTWARE

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

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.

2.1 - gtkterm and hterm

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

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:

  port	= /dev/ttyUSB0

  speed	= 115200

  bits	= 8

  stopbits	= 1

  parity	= none

  flow	= none

  wait_delay	= 0

  wait_char	= -1

  rs485_rts_time_before_tx	= 30

  rs485_rts_time_after_tx	= 30

  echo	= False

  crlfauto	= True

For hterm you must need to configure the tool analogously.

2.2 - QtCreator

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

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.

3 - BUILDING AND FLASHING

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

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:

  export SERIALBOOT=</absolute/path/to/the/SerialBoot/binary>

You can test the tool by calling it via the variable:

  >$ ${SERIALBOOT}

This should print some information about the tool.

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.

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