Software Integration

Since the hardware is deterministically approaching a usable state, its time to begin the Software integration...

To that end I have setup 5 ROS machines to begin creating and testing the first phases of getting a CubeSpawn machine into a virtualized State

 The 5 Physical machines have remote desktop sessions to cut/paste commands from the tutorials

The integration will focus on getting ROS and Rviz setup, then building a URDF for one of the Cartesian machines.

The integration consists of ROS, Machinekit, MTConnect, and possibly STEP-NC

I'll be focusing on getting some State machine info out of ROS and Machinekit via a very simplified MTConnect configuration, Since SwRI has built a MTConnect instance for ROS Industrial, there is a fairly solid foundation for that half of the channel...

More info here
http://rosindustrial.org/news/2013/11/9/ros-industrial-mtconnect-integration-program-completes

On the Machinekit side, it appears this has been discussed, but not implemented, however, I'll be dissecting the MTConnect/Makerbot repo
https://github.com/mtconnect/makerbot_agent

For while I have no love for Makerbot, a MTConnect to serial Cartesian device code base of some sort should provide a basis for retrieving state info, which should make hacking together a Beaglebone/Machinekit 3D printer example within the scope of this preliminary effort.


Thanks to John Morris, (A Machinekit Developer) I have this nifty System Diagram:

The "CubeSpawn Coordinator" is probably beyond my skills at this point, but if I can hack some basic communication FROM the machines with the available pieces, then writing a simple polling loop to push info to them should at least make some rudimentary control possible - then we'll bring in a professional.. ;-)

An' inch at a time...