Build Questions for Trifinger EDU

General
1

Hello! I have been working on putting together a trifinger edu robot for a bit, and I’m hoping to implement a bit of software to test it out. I’ve finished one finger module and have the electronics together for it. I have a few questions which would really help to have answered.

  1. I was wondering if it is possible to run software on the single finger?
  2. I am operating off of a laptop with linux, am I able to run the robot in real time using a usb connection, or can I only flash the boards, then run code on the robot?
  3. What volts and amps should I set my power supply to?
  4. The TI electronics stack has two Launchpads and three booster packs, if I flash them with a usb, do I flash both of them?
    Thank you to anyone whos able to help out!
2

Hello,

  1. Most of our software is for the TriFinger setup, but generally, you can also use a single finger alone. There are just not as many ready-to-use scripts for it. We have a basic demo here: robot_fingers/demos/demo_single_finger_position_control.py at master · open-dynamic-robot-initiative/robot_fingers · GitHub
    You should probably change the configuration file from “finger.yml” to “fingeredu.yml” in line 22, though (and adjust the can_ports).
  2. I assume you mean the direct USB connection to the Launchpads. With this, you can run the firmware in debug-mode and manually set some commands from within Code Composer Studio, but this is really only useful for debugging. Programmatically operation the robot from the computer unfortunately isn’t possible with USB but only via the CAN interface. There are USB-CAN-cards which should generally work. However, I don’t know how real-time-save the USB connection is, so I cannot say how stable it would be.
  3. 24 V, not sure about the amps right now (I’m not in the lab at the moment).
  4. Yes, you need to flash each launchpad individually.