Bringing up the pi3hat r4.2

robots, , , , ,

The pi3hat r4.2, now in the mjbots store, has only minor hardware changes from the r4 and r4.1 versions. What has changed in a bigger way is the firmware, and the software that is available to interface with it. The interface software for the previous versions was tightly coupled to the quad A1s overall codebase, that made it basically impossible to use with without significant rework. So, that rework is what I’ve done with the new libpi3hat library:

It consists of a single C++11 header and source file with no dependencies aside from the standard C++ library and bcm_host.h from the Raspberry Pi firmware. You can build it using the bazel build files, or just copy the source file into your own project and build with whatever system you are using.

Performance

Using all of the pi3hat’s features in a runtime performant way can be challenging, but libpi3hat makes it not so bad by providing an omnibus call which sequences accesses to all the CAN buses and peripherals in a way that maximizes pipelining and overlap between the different operations, while simultaneously maximizing the usage of the SPI bus. The downside is that it does not use the linux kernel drivers for SPI and thus requires root access to run. For most robotic applications, that isn’t a problem, as the controlling computer is doing nothing but control anyways.

This design makes it feasible to operate at least 12 servos and read the IMU at rates over 1kHz on a Raspberry Pi.

pi3hat_tool

There is a command line tool, pi3hat_tool which provides a demonstration of how to use all the features of the library, as well as being a useful diagnostic tool on its own. For instance, it can be used to read the IMU state:

# ./pi3hat_tool --read-att
ATT w=0.999 x=0.013 y=-0.006 z=-0.029  dps=(  0.1, -0.1, -0.1) a=( 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)

And it can be used to write and read from the various CAN buses. 

# ./pi3hat_tool --write-can 1,8001,1300,r \
                --write-can 2,8004,1300,r \
                --write-can 3,8007,1300,r
CAN 1,100,2300000400
CAN 2,400,2300000400
CAN 3,700,230000fc00

You can also do those at the same time in a single bus cycle:

# ./pi3hat_tool --read-att --write-can 1,8001,1300,r
CAN 1,100,2300000400
ATT w=0.183 x=0.692 y=0.181 z=-0.674  dps=(  0.1, -0.0,  0.1) a=(-0.0, 0.0,-0.0)

Next steps

Next up I’ll demonstrate my performance testing setup, and what kind of performance you can expect in a typical system.