Arduino to Roborio coms

Technical Java
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I’m a new mentor to team 3244 and First Robotics. My goal this year is to help the team learn and create more reliable and functional robots using sensors and software. I personally am a jack of all software languages but master of none. With a sample or two can stitch together usable and readable code. The team is off for a few weeks and we put together our First choice list. One item I placed on it is the REV RIOduino. Seems like a great versatile expansion board to run “stuff” on the robot as well as maybe offloading a Gyro/Accelerometers module. I have and tested a Gyro/Acc board with DMP MotionFusion and like the results compared to simply using a gyro that came with the KOP years ago. I tested this using an arduino before seem the next step is to use this board to share the data to the RoboRio.

Here is my hurdle to get over before presenting to the team and teaching the students. I would like to now how to share this data over one of the offered protocols I2C or UART and that is where I fall short. I would love to simulate the RoboRio since I do not have one to work with the next few weeks. What I do have in my box of tricks are 2(Arduinos), 1 Raspberry Pi, Lego NXT, and a Lego EV3 that has LEJOS installed. I’m thinking the EV3 with LEJOS will be the closet thing to the RIO running Java. What do you think? I have poked some around the Web and found Labview examples but not Java. Maybe someone can point to a more relevant Java source using this board. (RIOduino).

PS as I wrote this and was gathering my data I found this navX MXP Robotics Navigation Sensor Maybe this is the solution for all Gyro issues?

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I can’t help you with the RIOduino, but we were very happy with the navX MXP.

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navX-MXP includes a number of Java examples for RoboRIO that show how to use it for several uses including Field-Centric Drive, Rotate-to-Angle and Straight-line Driving as well as others. It mounts directly onto the RoboRIO’s MXP slot so it’s simple to install as well as use. And it comes w/some great tools including a UI that runs on the PC so students can quickly see how its various features work. There’s also STL files available for an enclosure that protects it when mounted on the RoboRIO, so you can print that yourself or order that from Shapeways. So it’s easy to get this up and running in short order.

If you do want to “roll your own” IMU using the RIODuino and an Invensense MPU-6050, you might want to look at the nav6 source code. The nav6 is the precursor to the navX-MXP, and features an Arudino w/a MPU-6050 6-aixs IMU on it. If you had a shield or a breakout board w/a MPU-6050 on it that could connect the MPU’s interrupt pin on it to one of the RIODuino pins, you could adapt the firmware to work. The nav6 used a UART to connect to the CRio, so you could use the same technique to communicate w/your Java robot application on the RoboRIO. Taking this on would be a very educational project, probably best reserved for off-season or for teams w/sufficient resources.

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I can’t see the RIOduino on my FIRST Choice page.

Are you looking at the complete AndyMark site instead?

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