Submitting Code

  1. From one of the lab machines, run /courses/taylor/submit (note the opening '/'). The command will result in a list of assignments open for submission.
  2. Put your code into a directory with the exact same name as the assignment you are trying to submit. For example, if you are trying to submit a Project01, your directory cannot be called "project01" or "Project1." This is the most common source of difficulty.
  3. Step out of that directory, so that if you ran ls, you would see your "Project01" (or whatever) directory.
  4. Run /courses/taylor/submit Project01/ If it doesn't say "Submission successful," it didn't work.

Controlling the Robotic Arm

We control the arm through the serial port, using the "serial" library of python to write commands. Here is a code base that you can use:

#!/usr/bin/python
import serial

ser = serial.Serial("/dev/ttyS0") #Connects to the serial port
ser.write('BD1\r') #First command "wakes up" the controller board
#more ser.write commands here
ser.close()

The remaining commands that you send should be of the form
SV<A servo number> M<1-255> \r

These commands can be linked together into one ser.write, as long as the total number of characters is no longer than 20, and it ends with a carriage return.