Possible compatibility between Arexx RA-1 Pro & LabVIEW.

[FarisM]

Hi people.

This is my first time posting and also using LabVIEW. I'm currently undergoing my final year project. The task handed to us is to design the end-effector of the robot given to us and program it in order to pick and assort eggs by May 2012. The robot given to us is the Arexx RA-1 Pro. I'm exploring ways of programming to automate a process sequence. It's not possible by writing a C+ file and then compling and flashing the microcontroller to do so.

I'm looking to see if anyone has any idea how I can achieve a sucessful communication between the robot to LabVIEW.

The specification of the robot is;

• Atmel ATMEGA64 8-bit AVR microcontroller
• FT232R USB UART
• 6 Analog Servos

Any help of direction where to go would be great. I have LabVIEW 2011 but I don't have the robotics edition. If I need to, please tell me.

Thank you,

F. Mahder

[niNickC]

Hello,

You can certainly use LabVIEW to communicate between your MCU and your PC. You could communicate over Serial and use NI VISA. A good place to start might be the VISA LabVIEW help pages:

https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/labview/page/using-visa-in-labview.html

If you have a search on the forums, a few people have done this and looking at some of their posts may be of help.

(If you were using an Arduino (based on AVR) there is infact a toolkit to make this process easier!

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019TmpSAE&l=en-US)

If you question is whether you can deploy LabVIEW code to your MCU, unfortunately this is not really possible. You can use the LabVIEW C code generator to integrate a LabVIEW algorithm into your C code but I am not sure you will be able to get hold of this.

https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/software-products/download.labview-c-generator-module.html 

[FarisM]

Hi Nick.

Thank you for your reply. It's given me a general idea about where to go in terms of researching and finding out the best method of communication.

I would like to also ask secondly, that I have another robot. It's called the Robai Cyton V2. It uses the Actin-SE to communicate through the FT232 USB UART between the robot and computer. I was wondering if there could be a feature which also integrates LabVIEW with this software.

I'm sorry for the questions, I'm inexperienced in this field but I'm very keen to learn LabVIEW as a skill.

Thank you,

F.Mahder

[niNickC]

Hello,

As long as your control chip can do Serial Comms, LabVIEW should be able to communicate with it. With regards to interfacing with the Actin-SE software, I can see on their website that they provide a C++ API. Depending on how this is distributed you may be able to call it from LabVIEW. If they provide DLLs, LabVIEW can call them.   

I certainly wish you luck in your endeavour - hopefully you will find it to be a good experience!