Operating System Upgrade
The operating system consists of two parts:
- RoBIOS
Robot Basic I/O System
- HDT
Hardware Description Table
All mobile robots controlled by an EyeBot share the
same RoBIOS but may differ in the HDT to account for
different sensors or motors connected to the actual hardware.
Upgrading of RoBIOS and HDT can be done seperately (usually RoBIOS
remains the same when the HDT is adapted).
There are two ways of upgrading:
- 1. Simply use Download to transfer a new version
of robios.hex or hdtxxxx.hex to the EyeBot. The operating
recognises these special files and will prompt whether the
Flash-ROM is to be reprogrammed.
- 2. Use the background debugger
(BDM)
connected to the parallel port of a PC as described below.
This has to be done when using a new (blank) Flash-ROM chip
or when the stored RoBIOS operating system has become corrupted.
Hardware Description Table (HDT)
Please see the
full HDT documentation.
In order to add/remove any sensors/actuators or change other
EyeBot characteristics (eg. CPU speed), you can change the corresponding
HDT file (eg. myhdt.c). Compile the altered c-file into
a hex-file by using:
gcchdt myhdt.c
Then download the new hex-file like
you would an ordinary application program. RoBIOS will automatically
detect the HDT-file and reflash the HDT section of the operating
system. Reset the system after the reflash is completed.
Thomas Bräunl, 1999