Neato XV Robot Setup Utilities

The tool sets includes the followings

nxvcontrol -- control Neato XV robot from GUI, supports functions include motor control, show sensors, LiDAR show and wheel moving etc.
nxvforward -- forward the control over network
nxvlogbatt -- log the battery status

Usage

nxvcontrol

Connection

Before you control the Neato XV robot, you need to setup your robot so that nxvcontrol can connect to your robot by clicking the Connect button in the Connection tab of the main program.

There're three types of connection for Neato XV devices, which are directly serial port, network connection, and simulation.

• directly serial port: you may specify the device name, for example, dev://COM11:115200 is for the port COM11 and the baudrate is 115200 in Windows.

• network connection: you may use a TCP port forwarder for your device and connect remotely from you PC.

  If you use a Linux box connected to your robot via USB, you may choose socat as port forwarder, such as:

  sudo socat TCP-LISTEN:3333,fork,reuseaddr FILE:/dev/ttyACM0,b115200,raw
  

  or use the nxvforward program provided by this package.

  The address Connect to line has its format such as tcp://192.168.1.2:3333, it'll connect to the port 3333 of the host 192.168.1.2.

• simulator: this feature is for software development or testing. just use the "sim:" as the address line, and click "Connect" to start simulation.

nxvforward

This is a TCP server, which can forward commands and data between device/simulator and clients. The bind address can be 120.0.0.1:3333 to accept connection from local only, or 0.0.0.0:3333 for connections from other hosts. The address line of Connect to is the same as nxvcontrol described above.

nxvlogbatt

To log the Neato XV robot's battery status, you need to specify the port and the data file. For example:

# for Linux
python3 nxvlogbatt.py -l nxvlogbatt.log -o nxvlogbatt-data.txt -a dev://ttyACM0:115200

# for Windows
python3 nxvlogbatt.py -l nxvlogbatt.log -o nxvlogbatt-data.txt -a dev://COM12:115200

To plot the figures from the data file, you may want to use the script nxvlogbatt-plotfig.sh:

nxvlogbatt-plotfig.sh PREFIX VBATRAT XRANGE TITLE COMMENTS

The arguments are

• PREFIX -- the data text file prefix, for example, prefix.txt
• VBATRAT -- draw the line "VBattV*200/%"
• XRANGE -- set the range of X(time), [0:2000]
• TITLE -- the figure title
• COMMENTS -- the comments of the figure

Example:

nxvlogbatt-plotfig.sh nxvlogbatt-data 0 "" "Battery Status" ""

Implementation Details

1. Neato XV Abstract Serial Interface

    Serial Port: COM11, /dev/ttyACM0
    Network Forward: tcp://localhost:3333
    Simulator: sim:
   

The toolset interprets with above interfaces via unified APIs. The implementation is in file neatocmdapi.py, and the simulator functions is in file neatocmdsim.py. The simulator can simulate the return data described in the Neato Programmer's Manual. It also simulates that the returned LiDAR data would be all zero if the motor is not running.

2. Scheduler: It's in file neatocmdapi.py, in which all of the tasks are scheduled by a center scheduler in one program, so the execution of the commands would not interference with each other, even in a network forward mode which supports serving multiple clients. (The commands which are mutual exclusion may still have interferences). The class provides a callback function, so the user can specify the working function to execute once one task is ready to go.

3. NCIService

It basically is a "hub" for the Neato serial interface, integrated a Scheduler and abstract serial interface, to support that the serial interface can only execute one task one time. The class provides open()/close() to start/stop the service; provides a mailbox(class MailPipe) and function get_request_block() to allow user implement their own processing task functions.

4. GUI

The toolset use Python tkinter to implement the GUI for the maximum portabilities between Linux, Windows, and other platforms. The tkinter GUI application uses the callback function to handle widget events, and to use the widget.after(time, callback) functions to preodically update the interfaces. To make the GUI convinient, the guilog.py provides several extensions for the widget, such as * Log output to textarea * ToggleButton * add right click pop-up menu to copy/paste text

5. Multi-Thread GUI

To make the GUI more responsible for the user interactive, the toolset uses multiple threads to process requests in the background. Since only GUI thread can update the tkinter interface, the other threads have to use Queue to ask the GUI thread to update the interfaces. In this implementation, the mailbox(class MailPipe, in file neatocmdapi.py) is used as a center solution for updating various widgets to simplified the code.