When I grabbed a cheap Thinkpad T42 laptop off of Ebay last year I was really pleased. It came with a fresh install of WinXP which allowed me to cleanly partition the single HDD with Partition Magic. With the intention to put Fedora onto that new partition, and do all the Robot development under Linux.
In all the Computer Games companies I've worked for it has always been Windows based development (using Cygwin for HW vendor tool chains). A linux distro is something I had toyed with occasionally, but knew that for embedded work I should really jump ship and develop wholesale under Linux. It was quite annoying to find that the DVD drive on the laptop was flaky :( Anyway, alot of existing Virtual COG'ers, including the guys over at Virtual Cogs, use a Windows/Cygwin setup for VC development. I could have perservered with Fedora (mounting the ISO in Windows to install from, etc.). But didn't require anything else that Cygwin had, so moved on.
This week I came across something really special, namely Wubi :) It cleverly installs Ubuntu onto an existing NTFS/FAT partition. The only thing it changes is to modify the WinXP boot loader to GRUB, to allow for dual booting into XP and Ubuntu. Tried this out, and it works fantastically!! My dev laptop now has Ubuntu!!! :)
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
VC21RB1 board comes alive..
Three posts in one day... A crowded house ;) and probably the topic of some kids docturate somewhere
Hopefully the Virtual Cogs guys aren't reading this (sorry Tarun and Dan if you are). I pushed them at the end of last year to release some example code to driver the motor controller board, VC21RB1. Huge credit to them they did release more than expected. Including a lovely way of using I2C to communicate between the VCMX212 and VC21RB1 :D
Since receiving the Virtual Cogs boards I couldn't remember if I had even tried to determine if the VC21RB1 board was working. All the other delivered boards I had tried, think this one was waiting for some test software before I tried it out. Anyway..
Last night I grabbed the VC21RB1 I2C demo code and apps from the VC wiki. Sorted out a new OpenOCD server connection to the VC21RB1 JTAG. And tried reflashing the VC21RB1 with the example code, which worked first time :) Uploaded the VCMX212 accompanying code with Hyperterminal Ymodem. And launched the Win APP to squirt commands down the USB-UART to the VCMX212, and further via I2C to the VC21RB1. I must admit I did a litte dance when that all worked first time!!! :)
The new motor controller is ALIVE!! :) Superb news. I can now have a look at connecting up some motors, etc..
Hopefully the Virtual Cogs guys aren't reading this (sorry Tarun and Dan if you are). I pushed them at the end of last year to release some example code to driver the motor controller board, VC21RB1. Huge credit to them they did release more than expected. Including a lovely way of using I2C to communicate between the VCMX212 and VC21RB1 :D
Since receiving the Virtual Cogs boards I couldn't remember if I had even tried to determine if the VC21RB1 board was working. All the other delivered boards I had tried, think this one was waiting for some test software before I tried it out. Anyway..
Last night I grabbed the VC21RB1 I2C demo code and apps from the VC wiki. Sorted out a new OpenOCD server connection to the VC21RB1 JTAG. And tried reflashing the VC21RB1 with the example code, which worked first time :) Uploaded the VCMX212 accompanying code with Hyperterminal Ymodem. And launched the Win APP to squirt commands down the USB-UART to the VCMX212, and further via I2C to the VC21RB1. I must admit I did a litte dance when that all worked first time!!! :)
The new motor controller is ALIVE!! :) Superb news. I can now have a look at connecting up some motors, etc..
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