AX-12 from gumstix

Last night I was able to get my test harness set up, and I was able to successfully ping an AX-12 from my gumstix code written in Squeak. I was also able to send a bunch of control commands to the AX-12, and have it move its arm through a sequence.

A big kudos goes to my brother, Dave, who wrote the glue code that runs on the robostix. Basically, my smalltalk code on the gumstix talks to the robostix over the serial port at 115,200 baud, and the program running on the robostix forwards whatever it gets over that port to the Bioloid bus, at 1 Mbps. It also passes back to the gumstix anything the Bioloid bus sends back in response. One key point to this is you do not need the interface hardware mentioned in the AX-12 manual - you only need to hook together the Rx and Tx pins on the robostix, and they can talk on the bus automagically.

Dave has posted his source code here and here (the second link is for a referenced file, CBUF.h). Anyone who wants to control a Bioloid robot from a gumstix should pick this up, and let him know you did.