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Cyton Gamma 300 in ROS

This version was saved 9 years, 4 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Andras Fekete
on November 13, 2014 at 12:11:49 am
 

How to get the Cyton Gamma 300 working

 

Things to know

First thing to know is that you'll need a 12V battery. Supposedly it works off of a 12VDC wall wart power supply, but for me it seems to have given problems. My suspicion is that it creates a ground loop through the USB (though it's supposed to be protected against that).

 

Secondly, the arm's internal hardware is very simple. It is made up of 7 Dynamixel MX-28 motors. These motors are daisy chained together on a communication bus which goes into a little black box in the base of the arm. Inside the box there is nothing more than a couple decoupling capacitors and a plug for the 12V input supply. According to the manufacturer, the motors can handle up to 18V. I have not tested that, nor is it necessary. From the little black box, there is a 2-wire cable going to the USB2DYNAMIXEL converter (its the white USB dongle). The two wires are ground and data.

 

Cyton Software

All the smarts for the arm are in the software that controls it. Cyton's software is very fragile. There are two aspects to the software: the low-level drivers and the interface to ROS using pieces of the low level drivers.

 

Low level drivers

To get these working, you must have the cytonGamma300ViewerSetup-4.0.20130130-ubuntu-12.04-amd64.sh script. It essentially extracts itsself and contains the proprietary Cyton drivers and ActinSE. It also gives some example code for getting communication up with the arm. I have taken one of these and made a super-simple one that makes the arm go to its 'home' position which is straight up. You can access it here: cytonAndras.cpp. The simplest way to compile it is to add it into the Robai/Cyton\ Gamma\ 300\ Viewer_4.0.20130130/cyton/examples folder and modify the Makefile in the parent folder.

 

Once you have the drivers compiled, you should test with the cytonAndras executable first. You'll read online about cytonViewer and how it's an amazing tool for testing this arm, but in my experience it is a buggy program that sometimes loads but mostly gets stuck in some infinite loop on startup if you have the arm connected. If you're on an Ubuntu system, you'll need to add your user to the 'dialout' group so that when you plug in the USB you'll have permissions to the /dev/ttyUSB0 device. Otherwise you'll need to do "sudo chmod ugo+rw /dev/ttyUSB0" each time you plug the USB into the computer.

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