Khepera On-board High-Speed Radio Communication Module (Khepera Comm) Copyright 2000 William Michael Siever -------------------------------------------------------------------- This module allows a remote computer to change the speed of the Khepera's every 1/30th of a second. (That is the ONLY portion of the Khepera which may be controlled) Downloading to the Khepera: --------------------------- 1) Setup the S interface cable and the Host Computer (See Section 5.2 of the Khepera User Manual) and configure the robot to Mode 3 (See Appendix E of the Khepera User Manual) 2) Run minicom (If not installed, install it or contact a system administrator). 3) Setup Minicom's Serial Port for 38400 N 2 communication (CTRL-a o, Serial Port Setup, e, g, k, u) Also verify that minicom is setup to communicate with an appropriate com port. /dev/ttyS0 typically corresponds to COM1, /dev/ttyS1 typically corresponds to COM2, etc. (CTRL-a o, Serial Port Setup, a) 4) Setup Minicom's File Transfer Protocol for ASCII to an appropriate speed. (For Most: CTRL-a o, File Transfer Protocols, I (ASCII), enter, /usr/bin/ascii-xfr -svn -l 13, enter 6 times) 5) Configure the "Radio ID" on the Khepera's Radio Turret. Be sure that the radio is NOT set as the primary interface (DIP switch 6 is OFF) and that each robot has a unique ID via DIP switches 1-5. 6) Connect the Khepera to the Serial Cable and power on (Or reset) You should see: "ROM of minirobot KHEPERA..." If not, carefully review steps 6-10 7) Type "run sloader" into minicom. This will cause the Khepera to run it's code downloader. 8) Send bin/khepera_comm.s37 to the Khepera in ascii mode via minicom. (CTRL-a s, ascii, g bin, select khepera_comm.s37) 9) The front left red light should blink very quickly for about 10s while the Khepera is downloading the program. It will turn off when the download is complete and the khepera program will signal the host computer that it is running for example: Robot 31 Entering Message Loop Message Group 4; Message Pos 9 In this case, the robot's radio turret is configured as turret #31 (DIP switches 1-5 are ON). It will only respond to radio messages for "group 4" and it will always use data from the 9th (and 10th) position in the message. References ---------- GNU Cross-Compiler for Khepera, Khepera User Manual, & Radio Turret Manual: http://www.k-team.com/download/khepera.html