Description of boebotgenericmotor and boebotgenericdrive

untulis

Chris Savage of Parallax suggested that I post these questions here and that Andy Lindsay might answer them.· I really want to understand how MRDS defines the interface for the boe-bot and how the boe-bot receives information and transmits it back.· I am hoping there is an reference specification for both sides of the interface.· I am working with some High School and some Community College students.· I would like to describe to them how this all works, but I feel inadequate to the task at this point.· I plan to generate a document to describe how all this works and that pulls all the information together into one place instead of it being scattered across multiple documents, multiple books·and multiple web sites.

I have had great difficulty getting the boebotgenericmotor and boebotgenericdrive to work with Bluetooth.· I sorted out the Bluetooh fairly early, but I had to modify the .bs2 file to convince myself that the code was working correctly on the boe-bot

I have sorted out some of the problems I have been having via trial and error for controlling two separate generic motors, but this is not a very satisfying way of eventually finding answers. I have not been able to get the boebotgenericdrive working yet. I found some of what I know by looking at csharp code and digging through xml files. Is there a document that tells:

• The parameters for the boebotgenericmotor and bobbotgenericdrive
• What their range of values are – finally figured out that Hardware Identifier set to 12 maps to 12 on the boe-bot and anything else that is non-zero for·the second motor will select 13 for the other motor.
  • The reverse polarity switch does not seem to work – what is the range of values?
  • What are the settings for the PowerScaleFactor and how do I change these dynamically?
• How can these parameters be changed them on the fly in VPL?
• How to add motors to the boe-bot and address them on slots 14 and 15?
• Is the MotorName just for documentation?
• How to address sensors in the code
• What is the protocol for sending information to the boe-bot and getting information back.· The bs2 file just has a bunch or numbers and does not describe what they correspond to.

I can also be reached at chuck.untulis@gmail.com.

Thanks

Chuck

Andy Lindsay (Parallax)

Hi Chuck,

My experience with this product is mainly at the low level. I can help answer questions about the direct communication between the Boe-Bot robot and BoeBotControl.cs. The main resource for understanding how the communication between the Boe-Bot robot and BoeBotControl.cs happens is Appendix A in this document:

http://www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/docs/prod/robo/MSRS-Bluetooth-Boe-Bot-v1.5.pdf

I had some success with MSRS 1.0 VPL, but it seems like Microsoft broke it all in 1.5. There are some instructions posted here that are supposed to fix it:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1847149&SiteID=1

The folks on that forum have been pretty helpful, and they might be able to better answer your VPL questions.

Andy

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Andy Lindsay

Education Department
Parallax, Inc.

untulis

Hi Andy,

Thanks.· I will check them out.

Chuck

untulis

Hi Andy,

Appendix A is very helpful.

I am running MRDS with the additions from the ProMRDS book. I do not have a Samples\Platform\Parallax folder, but I searched all the BasicStamp2.xslt files and they all point to ...2007\10\basicstamp2.html.

One of the authors of the ProMRDS has recently joined Microsoft and he will be looking into the genericdrive issue at the end of the week. In the meantime, I will continue to poke around in the code.

Is there any reason that there is no bounds checking for the motor parameters in the bs2 code?

Thanks again.

Chuck

Thanks again.

Trevor Taylor

Just FYI Andy,

The sample code from ProMRDS includes a Parallax folder under Chapter14. This works with V1.5 "out of the box".

I have migrated the services to the July CTP of 2.0 and they work fine on my desktop PC which is running Vista 64-bit. I am going to test it with my laptop running XP SP2 over the weekend.

I have been talking to Chuck off-line.

By the way, the biggest problem I have found is adjusting the servos so that the wheels do not "creep". Apart from that I have found the Boe-Bot to be quite reliable. I even managed to control it using my PDA with built-in Bluetooth and a Compact Framework version of the MRDS services. I have not migrated these services to the latest CTP yet, but I will if I have time over the weekend. It makes a pretty cool demo.

Trevor