I’ve been developing a new bi-directional spread spectrum radio to command and control the mjbots quad robot. Here I’ll describe my first integration of the protocol into the robot.
To complete that integration, I took the library I had designed for the nrfusb, and ported it to run on the auxiliary controller of the pi3 hat. This controller also controls the IMU and an auxiliary CAN-FD bus. It is connected to one of the SPI buses on the raspberry pi. Here, it was just a matter of exposing an appropriate SPI protocol that would allow the raspberry pi to receive and transmit packets.
Slightly unfortunately, this version of the pi3hat does not have interrupt lines for any of the stm32s. Thus, I created a multiplexed status register that the rpi can use to check which of the CAN, IMU, or RF has data pending. Then I slapped together a few registers which allowed configuring the ID and reading and writing slots and their priorities.
Then I refactored things around on the raspberry pi side so that one core would keep busy polling for one of those things to become available. So far, for the things which access SPI, I’ve been putting them locked to an isolcpu cpu to get improved SPI timing. Eventually, once I have interrupt lines, I might consolidate all of these down to a single core. That, plus defining an initial mapping between the controls and slots resulted in:
Finally, I created a very simple GL gui application which connects to an nrfusb and a joystick. It uses Dear ImGui to render a few widgets and glfw to window and read the joystick.
While I was at it, I finally updated my joystick UI to make gait selection a bit faster, and got the robot to do a better job of switching out of the walk gait. Thus the following video showing all of that hooked together.
A Modicum of Fun 