Hemisson with Camera
ProMRDS Home Page Chapter 17

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Chapter 17 - Writing New Hardware Services

Summary

The last chapter of the book discusses creating new services for robots that are not already supported by MRDS. It discusses several aspects of the design, and develops a new generic contract for small robots called the Generic Brick.

Contents

The following applications are included in this Chapter:

The Generic Brick Contract defines standard I/O devices that are common to many small robots. It allows a single framework to be used so that more versatile applications can be written that take advantage of several different robots.

To test implementations of robots based on the Generic Brick, the Test service allows you to exercise all of the brick operations.

The Integrator, from PicBlok, is a very simple robot based on a PICAXE chip. The services for the Integrator were developed from scratch, including a simple monitor program. The MRDS services for the Integrator use the Generic Brick contract.

The Hemisson, from K-Team (who also make the Khepera), is a relatively cheap educational robot. It has a PIC16F877 microcontroller that is pre-programmed with a monitor program. Services for the Hemisson are also based on the Generic Brick contract.

Legal Stuff

The services in this chapter were developed specifically for the book.

This code is available free of charge for non-commercial use. For more information, please see the Licence Agreement.