A person has already come to me asking how to interface an Axon Microcontroller to LabView. Instead of a bland answer to the effect of “It’s nothing special”, I decided to write a quick write-up about communications between computer systems; and I will use the communication between my SAGAR robot and LabView operator panel as an example.
My SAGAR project has gotten to a point where I would like to document the system design through a series of detailed posts.
First I’ll show the new interface, and talk about how it communicates with SAGAR.
Here is a video of the new interface, with an inset of SAGAR as it runs the mission.
NMCI friendly:
In a joint effort between my girlfriend and I, SAGAR now has a super fancy LabView based graphical user interface. The video below is a screen capture of the interface as SAGAR runs a mission taking it around a parking lot. All communications are in the form of NMEA sentences. The DIYdrones ground station gave us a few ideas of what we wanted to do.
Ok, so I’m a little overexcited. I just got back from watching SAGAR complete it’s first autonomous mission. I just finished coding the navigation functions and couldn’t wait till the next day to test. Attached is an image of the mission it ran.
I used a Ardupilot program to generate the mission file with waypoints, convert it to a hex file using gcc, and I manually flash that into the Axon’s EEPROM memory. When SAGAR comes online, I give it a command to scan the mission file in memory, then I command it to run the mission.