Command line utilities and Java library for operating, maintaining and interfacing HX19 ultrasound positioning devices.
The HX19 devices allow positioning of robots, robot arms, quadcopthers, vehicles, etc, with high precision and frequency.
The system consists of a few Transmitters, Receivers and at least one Monitor attached to a PC to communicate with the system.
With at least 3 of the devices in a fixed position (or just 2 for 2D positioning) the position of the rest can be calculated.
The code provided in this project provides command line tools and a Java library to operate and interface with the HX19 ultrasound positioning devices.
The tools are written in Java and Groovy and leverage ZeroMQ to allow local or network access to devices from a number of programming languages and platforms.
- Java 6 or higher.
- Groovy 2.0 or higher.
- jssc-2.8.0.jar - Serial port access.
- jeromq-0.3.2.jar - ZeroMQ pure Java implementation.
We use Gradle as build system. We use the wrapper, so the there are no separate manual downloads. Both Gradle itself and all dependences are automatically downloaded on the first build. Below are detailed instructions for Linux.
Install git
sudo apt-get install git
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/hexamite/hx19-java.git
Build
cd hx19-java
./gradlew build
Plug the HX19 Monitor device to a USB port. The serial port name will appear in /dev typically ttyUSB0 or ttyUSB1.
Own the serial port.
sudo chown <your-user-name> /dev/ttyUSB0
Run the serial server.
./serial-server.sh /dev/<port-name>
Now you can run the command line utilities to montior, send messages to and upload files to the devices. Groovy is required so have that installed first. Make sure the groovy command itself is on the executable path. Now you can run
src/util/groovy/monitor -h
src/util/groovy/message -h
src/util/groovy/upload -h
The easiest way to experiment with the system is to copy and modify the monitor Groovy script. ZeroMQ allows multiple subscribers to attach to the same port.
The tools provided in this project are ready to use and provide an alternative to the VB6 programs previously used, for those who do their own 3D calculations. They are still not widely tested and they are still missing the position calculations. They provide only the distances between Receivers and Transmitters.
In the next few weeks we will add positioning calculations so that a stream of device coordinates can be pushed to listening application(s).
Visit Hexamite for more details..