How do I use CANOpen on a Maxon's EPOS controller - c++

I am a french student in robotics and I have a project in which I have to connect 3 EPOS and my computer via EPOS 3.
I already wrote a programm in C++ to send bytes but I don't understand what to send and when.
For my project, I want to have the computer in master mode to send data to each controller (has orders) and when they all recieved it, I activate them by sending a global message and put them to sleep when they are finished
I read a lot of documentation and I think I want to initialze the NMT first ?
But I can't find anything such as an example or anything more than abstracts schematics.
I used a programm given by maxon to send bytes directly and the controller respond but never what I expect it to be.
And when I try to initialize it, the led on the controller shows me that it's not initialize.
Anyway thank you for everyone who will take the time to reply !

Related

How do I create new tasks TI RTOS?

I've been trying to develope an APP for the CC2650 from TI. Im working with the SimpleBLEperipheral example.
What I want to do is:
read a UART (up to 80 byte length)
Write the message to a characteristic
The messages come once a second. Here is, where the problem begins:
When I send a request to the device, that is connected via UART, I get a short answer, that is mixed with the messages, that are secondly sent.
In my App I read the UART once a second in the SimpleBLEPeripheral_performPeriodicTask of the example.
The answers, that come in between the messages will not be read, because of timing problems. My idea was to create a task only for reading the UART and use a callback, but that doesnt seem to work. When I create another task, the App doesnt work at all. No task gets called and the device doesnt advertise.
HELP!

nanoKONTROL2 receive/send data RtMidi c++

Two Questions:
1) Is it possible to send a message to the device and receive all the current input values?
I am trying to receive and send data to the KORG nanoKONTROL2. I found an API for real-time input/output called RtMidi. Receiving data is no issue, but I don't have the state where the sliders and knobs are in when the application starts. I presume, if this could be done, you need to send a message to the device.
There is an RtMidiOut class with sendMessage functionality where you can send data (vector<uchar>) to the device, but I don't know what data to send (I did try with some for loops to see if anything happens, but no luck).
2) Is it possible to turn the button lights on/off? If so, how?
To clarify the second question; I am trying to create a toggle where the light of the button on the device will turn on/off according to the state of the toggle.
Additional Information: The received data exists of 3 unsigned char's where the first value is probably an id, I am not quite sure, the second is the button/slider id and the third is its value.
Source code link to GitHub.

Socket programming beginners questions

I'm really new to this whole socket and server development, I'm not yet familiar with how it all works.
I made a simple flash application that needs to communicate with a socket,
With that, I used a socket that supports AS3 and works on "Red Tamarin",
Well I'll get to the point:
I currently have a loop that always runs socket.receive()
It responds and even displays text that I send from my flash application.
My goal is to get a simple online flash game,
Probably use SQL / SQLite to save information and export it to players,
What I don't understand is how I can take it there..
What I thought I'll need to do is something like so:
On the server side:
Have a loop that runs as long as the server is alive, that loop should always check every connection it has with clients and wait for commands coming from them, such as log in, update player position, disconnect, request list of objects in given positions
Client side:
Send information to the server according to the action, like when a player moves, send the new position to the server in a similar way to this : "MovePlayer[name][x][y]"
Is my plan really how things should be?
And about the actual information being sent, I'm curious, will it be efficient to constantly send the server string data? (that's what I'm used to work with, not some weird bytes and stuff)
Thanks in advance!
You're on the right track. But I encourage you to first define a communication protocol. You can start by defining what a command looks like. For example:
COMMAND <space> PARAM1 <space> PARAM2 <line-break>
A few considerations on the protocol definition:
What if PARAM1 is a string and contains spaces? How can you tell the start and end of each parameter?
Your parameters could also contain a line-break.
If your client application is installed by your clients, they'll need to update it once in a while. To complicate even further, they may run an older version and expect it to work, even if you have changed your protocol. This imposes a need for protocol versioning. Keep that in mind if you require user interaction for updating the client part of your application.
These are the most fundamental considerations I can think for your scenario. There may be other important considerations, but most of them depend on how your game works. Feel free to amend my list if you think I forgot something OP should consider.
After defining what a command looks like, document all commands you believe your applications needs. Don't segregate definition of a command unless it becomes too complex or excessively long for some of your operations. Try to keep things simple.
Now back to your questions:
Is my plan really how things should be?
Yes. That's exactly how it should be.
And about the actual information being sent, I'm curious, will it be efficient to constantly send the server string data? (that's what I'm used to work with, not some weird bytes and stuff)
That depends on a number of factors:
Which protocol you're using (TCP, UDP, etc);
Number of concurrent clients;
Average time to process a command;
Do you broadcast updates to other players?
How you did implement your server application;
Physical contraints:
Hardware: CPU, memory, etc;
Network: bandwidth, latency, etc;
(source: it20.info)
look at this
https://code.google.com/p/spitfire-and-firedrop/
there you will see the basic of building a socket server with redtamarin
see in particular
https://code.google.com/p/spitfire-and-firedrop/source/browse/trunk/spitfire/src/spitfire/Server.as
the details is as follow, redtamarin basically use blocking sockets with select()
with a max hard coded FD_SETSIZE of 4096
see:
https://code.google.com/p/redtamarin/wiki/Socket#maxConcurrentConnection
so here what happen in your server loop
you basically have an array of sockets object
you loop every x milliseconds and for each socket
you ask if you can read it
if you can read on the socket, you then compare if this socket obj is the server
if it is the server that means you have a new connection
if not that means a client try to send you data and so you read this data
and then pass it to an "interpreter"
later in the same loop you check if the socket obj is still valid
and if you can write to it
if you can write and the socket object is not the server
then you can send data to the client
here the equivalent code in C for reference
http://martinbroadhurst.com/source/select-server.c.html
http://www.lowtek.com/sockets/select.html
for a very basic example look at socketpolicyd
https://code.google.com/p/spitfire-and-firedrop/wiki/socketpolicyd
https://code.google.com/p/spitfire-and-firedrop/source/browse/trunk/socketpolicyd/src/spitfire/SocketPolicyServer.as
and compare the implementation with Perl and PHP
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/socket_policy_files.html

Optimum Update frequency for a client server based multiplayer game

I am making a multiplayer game in c++ :
The clients simply take commands from the users, calculate their player's new position and communicate it to the server. The server accepts such position updates from all clients and broadcasts the same about each to every. In such a scenario, what parameters should determine the time gap between consecutive updates ( i dont want too many updates, hence choking the n/w). I was thinking, the max ping among the clients should be one of the contributing parameters.
Secondly, how do i determine this ping/latency of the clients ? Other threads on this forum suggest using "raw sockets" or using the system's ping command and collecting the output from a file .. do they mean using something like system('ping "client ip add" > file') or forking and exec'ing a ping command..
This answer is going to depend on what kind of a multiplayer game you are talking about. It sounds like you are talking about an mmo-type game.
If this is the case then it will make sense to use an 'ephemeral channel', which basically means the client can generate multiple movement packets per second, but only the most recent movement packets are sent to the server. If you use a technique like this then you should base your update rate on the rate in which players move in the game. By doing this you can ensure that players don't slip through walls or run past a trigger too quickly.
Your second question I would use boost::asio to set up a service that your clients can 'ping' by sending a simple packet, then the service would send a message back to the client and you could determine the time it took to get the packet returned.
If you're going to end up doing raw-packet stuff, you might as well roll your own ICMP packet; the structure is trivial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping).
The enet library does a lot of the networking for you. It calculates latency as well.

Recommendations on multiple types of games server

I've already developed some online games (like chess, checkers, risk clone) using server side programming (PHP and C++) and Flash (for the GUI). Now, I'd like to develop some kind of game portal (like www.mytopia.com). In order to do so, I must decide what is a good way to structure my server logic.
At first I thought in programming separated game servers for each game. In this way, each game will be an isolated program that opens a specific port to the client. I thought also in creating different servers to each game room (each game room allow 100 clients connected on the same time). Of course I'd use database to link everything (like highscores, etc).
Then, I guess it is not the best way to structure a game portal server. I'm reading about thread programming and I think that is the best way to do it. So, I thought in doing something like a connection thread that will listen only to new connection clients (that way every type of game client will connect in only one port), validate this client (login) and then tranfer this client to the specific game thread (like chess thread, checkers thread, etc). I'll be using select (or variants) to handle the asynchronous clients (I guess the "one thread per client" is not suited this time). This structure seems to be the best but how do I make the communication between threads? I've read about race conditions and global scope variables, so one solution is to have a global clients array (vector or map) that need to be locked by connection thread or game thread everytime it is changed (new connection, logout, change states, etc). Is it right?
Has anyone worked in anything like this? Any recommendations?
Thanks very much
A portal needs to be robust, scalable and extensible so that you can cope with larger audiences, more games/servers being added, etc. A good place to start is to look into the way MMOs and distributed systems are designed. This might help too: http://onlinegametechniques.blogspot.com/
Personally, I'd centralise the users by having an authentication server, then a separate game server for each game that validates users against the authentication server.
If you use threads you might have an easier time sharing data but you'll have to be more careful about security for exactly the same reason. That of course doesn't address MT issues in general.
TBH I've been doing a voip system where the server can send out many streams and the client can listen to many streams. The best architecture I've come up with so far is just to bind to a single port and use sendto and recvfrom to handle communications. If i receive a valid connect packet from a client on a new address then I add the client to an internal list and begin sending audio data to them. The packet receive and response management (RRM) all happens in one thread. The audio, as it becomes ready, then gets sent to all the clients from the audio thread. The clients respond saying they received the audio and that gets handle on the RRM thread. If the client fails to respond for longer than 30 seconds then I send a disconnect and remove the client from my internal list. I don't need to be particularly fault tolerant.
As for how to do this in a games situation my main thought was to send a set of impulse vectors (the current one and 'n' previous ones). This way if the client moves out of sync it can check how out of sync it is by checking the last few impulses it should have received for a given object. If it doesn't correspond to what its got then it can either correct or if it is too far out of sync it can ask for a game state reset. The idea being to try and avoid doig a full game state reset as it is going to be quite an expensive thing to do.
Obviously each packet would be hashed so the client can check the validity of incoming packets but it also allows for the client to ignore an invalid packet and still get the info it needs in the next update and thus helping prevent the state reset.
On top of that its worth doing things like keeping an eye on where the client is. There is no point in sending updates to a client when the client is looking in the other direction or there is something in the way (ie the client can't see the object its being told about). This also limits the effectiveness of a wallhack packet sniffing the incoming packets. Obviously you have to start sending things a tad before the object becomes visible, however, or you will get things popping into existence at inconvenient moments.
Anyway ... thats just some random thoughts. I have to add that I've never actually written a multiplayer engine for a game so I hope my musings help ya a bit :)