PLEN Playground - Forum

Hi Lee,

Our plendev uses systemd to run /home/root/plen-dev.sh.

To confirm it, run
  systemctl list-unit-files --type=service | grep plen
  cat /etc/systemd/system/plen-dev.service
on your plendev.

You can start or stop plen-dev.service by yourself:
  systemctl [start/stop] plen-dev
and check the status:
  systemctl status plen-dev

I hope it would help you.

Hi Lee,

I see. You can control your plendev's motion through USB connection,
but you cannot do through BLE/Wifi connection.
Because the control board has the USB connector and the Edison has BLE/Wifi chip,
the connection between the control board and the Edison is most suspicious.

Is it from the beginning? It is likely hardware trouble, I suppose.
You can check the cable by your multimeter of course,
but how about consulting the official support team first?

Hi Lee,

>in fact i run the rostopic pub command from the putty connection in the plen2Dev.  is this matter ? do i need to run from my ubuntu ROS ?
It does not matter at all.

>by the way i notice there is 2 connectors from the Plen head board to the arduino controller board, is the connection of the between headboard and controller board matter ?  which one i should attached to ?
I'm using the left one. If you can control your plendev by the PLENconnect, it must be OK.

In the plendev please run
  rostopic echo /BleToControl
and tap the 'bow' motion in the PLENconnect, then you will get a message on your console like this:
>data: serial,w,$MP04
>---
>data: gpio,w,act
>---
(If you don't get anything, please tap several times.
I don't know why, but sometimes it seems to fail to show these messages.)
This means the message 'serial,w,$MP04' was sent on the topic /BleToControl.
And your plendev read them and bowed, didn't he/she?
So, if you send the same message on the same topic, your plendev must bow.
  rostopic pub -1 /BleToControl std_msgs/String -- 'serial,w,$MP04'

Take it easy.

Hi ylee12,

Hmm.. It worked for my plendev.
As the tutorial says, 'serial,w,$pm04' means 'play the motion in the slot #4'.
The slot #4 of your plendev may be empty.

How about other slots?
Or you can try (re)installing motions into your plendev by motioninstaller.

Hi ylee12,

>  i plan to use BLE to trigger plen "wake up"  is there a way to do so ?
It must be cute! I believe it's not so difficult, theoretically.

First, you need to ensure to connect your ble device to the intel edison of your plendev somehow.
[BLE device]->[Intel Edison(plendev)]-[Control Board(plendev)]
You can find some good guides about it online.
For example:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articl … tel-edison

Then, it's ok to write a small ROS program to publish a ROS message to the /BleToControl topic when the BLE event is caught.
[BLE device]->[Intel Edison(plendev)]->[Control Board(plendev)]

I would be happy if it's of some help.

Hi ylee12,

I'm glad to hear your plen has recovered. Congrats!

In our plendev, ROS is running by default.
But because you changed the network setting, you need to reconfigure several ROS environment variables of your plendev as follows:
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.175:11311
ROS_IP=192.168.1.175
ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.1.175

I recommend you reboot your plendev once here.
Your laptop should bet set as follows:
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.175:11311
ROS_IP=192.168.1.94
ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.1.94
(If you haven't installed ROS to your laptop, please install it.)

Then, your plendev and laptop must be in one ROS system now.
To make sure of it, please run
laptop> rostopic list
You will receive the list of topics in your ROS system like this:
/BleToControl
/ControlToBle
/ControlToGpio
/ControlToI2c
/ControlToSerial
/GpioToControl
/I2cToControl
/PcToControl
/SerialToControl
/rosout
/rosout_agg

How about controlling the LEDs of your plen from your laptop for the next step?
LED ON:
laptop> rostopic pub -1 /PcToControl std_msgs/String -- "gpio,w,on"
LED OFF:
laptop> rostopic pub -1 /PcToControl std_msgs/String -- "gpio,w,off"

Enjoy!

Hi, ylee12

Do you mean you ran your first two export commands on your control PC
and suddenly it lost the connection with PLENDEV?
That sounds very strange.
Your export commands couldn't affect your wifi connection
because they just set some environment variables of ROS.

I'm afraid your PLENDEV and PC have another problem.
Did you surely connect your PLENDEV to the router?
By default, our PLENDEV makes his own local wifi network.
(SSID:PLEN2devXXXX)

Hi, brjapon

* Ensure the PC to connect to the ROS_MASTER_URI
I found a small mistake in the tutorial.
Try setting ROS_MASTER_URI with "http://" like this:
  export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.42.1:11311
To make sure that the PC is connected to the master process in the PLEN2,
run
  $ rostopic list
on the control PC, for example.

* Launch ROS processes in PLEN2
If you want to launch ROS processes in PLEN2 automatically,
add a command to run your script to
  /home/root/plen-dev.sh

* Launch ROS processes in control PC for running the blink LED script
As the tutorial says:
  $ python <CREATED_SCRIPT_NAME>

I think ROS is fun as well as PLEN2. Let's enjoy!

Oh, dangerous! I'm afraid that too.
Let's wait for the official answer together.

Hi, Guavalif

It worked!
I need to change BLESERIAL_BAUDRATE if I use wifi connection instead of BLE, right?
Thank you so much.

By the way, today in Sunday. Don't work too hard! :)

Hi Guvalif,

Fortunately, the support team offered me to give a new servo for the broken one,
because it's likely an early failure. I'm happy!

Anyway, I understand we need to avoid big servo stress for safety.
Thank you.