Rasware is a generic robotics library project for the EK-LM4F120XL Stellaris Launchpad, built on top of StellarisWare. It is intended to be used for UT RAS's Robotathon competition as well as general purpose robotics projects. Authored by the IEEE - Robotics and Automation Society Student Branch at the University of Texas at Austin. For documentation, see Rasware's Github wiki.
Settings -> Collaborators
and add each team member as a collaboratorThe remainder of the instructions will depend on what type of system you're running.
We have revived RASBox, which is a virtual image already setup and tailored for your Robotathon needs.
NOTE If the link above doesn't work, try from Oracle's site.
NOTE You may need to enable hardware virtualization from your BIOS. See here for help.
sudo usermod -aG vboxusers <USERNAME>
, replacing <USERNAME>
with your username. You can check who you are with the command whoami
.groups <USERNAME>
, if vboxusers shows up you're good and should retry step 2./dev/
for a device called lm4f
.Once you've followed these steps to a T, start up and log in to the virtual machine (It's preconfigured to log in without the password by default.) The terminal application should start up and ask you to run the post-install script. Once this is completed successfully, you need to setup RASWare. You need to clone your forked repository of Rasware, and then run that setup script. When complete, you should be able to flash RASDemo to your TM4C!
# post-install script
cd ~/RASBox
sh setup_vm.sh
# rasware setup script
git clone <URL> # <URL> being the git url of your forked Rasware repo
cd ~/RASBox
sh setup_rasware.sh
# Further development instructions can be found at:
code ~/RASBox/RASbox_User_Guide.md
code ~/RASBox/Rasware/RASwareCrashCourse.md
We suggest that if you do want to create your own VM from another distrobution, allocate about 15-20 GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. The relevant instructions can be found here.
Please jump to the Setup For Mac or the Setup For Linux instructions further below.
Before we do anything else, run this in your terminal if you're running Marericks or newer (macOS 10.9+) and haven't already done this:
xcode-select --install
Install OpenOCD through Homebrew in a terminal.
brew install openocd
Install the Cross Compiler Toolchain for Embedded ARM Devices through Homebrew as well:
brew cask install gcc-arm-embedded
On macOS devices belong to the wheel
group, so in order to access the devices on your Mac (like the Launchpad) you also need to be part of the wheel
group. Put the following in a terminal to see what groups you're part of:
groups
wheel
was one of the groups listed, you're good to go and can skip the next step.If not, add yourself to the wheel
group:
sudo dscl . append /Groups/wheel GroupMembership $(whoami)
These instructions are written for use in a terminal (xterm, gterm, kterm, tty1, etc.) and assume that you have already installed, and are familiar with, your favorite text editor. If you have not found a favorite text editor, I recomend you take a look at Vim, Emacs, and SublimeText3.
sudo pacman -S git base-devel openocd screen arm-none-eabi-gcc gdb arm-none-eabi-newlib
sudo apt-get install git build-essential openocd screen gcc-arm-none-eabi gdb libnewlib-arm-none-eabi
Create a directory to work in. This is where we will place everything.
mkdir ras
cd ras
Use git to clone Rasware, replacing
git clone https://github.com/<USERNAME>/Rasware.git
Locate Stellarisware, the TI library, in Rasware/Downloads on your computer (in the repository you cloned).
Uncompress the file, compile StellarisWare, and move it to /usr/local/lib
.
tar vfx StellarisWare.tar.bz2
cd StellarisWare
make
cd ..
sudo mv StellarisWare /usr/local/lib
rm StellarisWare.tar.bz2
NOTE: skip this step if you're on macOS.
To avoid needing root access to communicate with the lm4f, you will need to copy the lm4f rule to the udev directory.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ut-ras/Rasware/master/RASLib/51-lm4f.rules
sudo mv 51-lm4f.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
Trigger udev for the new rules to come into effect.
sudo udevadm control --reload
sudo udevadm trigger
NOTE: This may trigger your display to shrink if on a VM. You can fix this by right clicking on the desktop background and rechoosing your display resolution.
Plug in a Stellaris Launchpad. you should now see the file /dev/lm4f
.
Compile RASLib by using the make program.
cd Rasware/RASLib
make
cd ../RASTemplate
make
cd ../RASDemo
make
We have created an example project to demonstrate Rasware running on a Launchpad.
Compile RASDemo.
cd Rasware/RASDemo
make
To flash RASDemo to the board, we use make with different arguments.
make flash
You may get an "Error 1" the first time you run this. In this case, simply make flash again. If this doesn't help, next make sure your USB device is connected, powered on, and forwarded to your VM if necessary. If you see "shutdown command invoked," press the reset button. This will start the program on your launchpad. If you keep getting Error 1's, make sure you've forwarded your LaunchPad's USB connection to the VM.
Else, if at this point an error message is printed that includes "Error erasing flash with vFlashErase packet", run the following command twice and press the board's reset button:
openocd -f $(find /usr -path */scripts/board/*tm4c123* 2>/dev/null) -c init -c halt -c "flash write_image erase RASDemo.out" -c verify_image RASDemo.out -c halt -c shutdown
You should now be able to use make flash
normally until you flash from Keil again. Keil seems to break things. Thank you to Kevin George for this workaround.
If a launchpad is plugged in, it should be accessible at a special file in /dev
(/dev/lm4f
on Linux, /dev/tty.usbmodem[board's serial id]
on macOS - run the detect-board script in the RASLib folder if you're curious). You can use make to create a terminal over UART.
make uart
You should now be presented with the RASDemo menu. Feel free to mess around and look into RASDemo's source code to see how it is done. To exit, you can detach the screen by pressing C-a d
, or control-A followed by a d. To get back to the launchpad's console, in your terminal run screen -r
. If you would rather kill the screen process, you can press C-a k y
, or control-A followed by k then y.
If you don't want to do all of the above steps each time, you can run everything with one command.
make run
However, please note opening the console may give an error if the command was already run before and was detached. If this happens, try running screen -r
in console.
There's also make start
which will flash your board and start your program without opening the console.
git config --global user.name "User Name"
git config --global user.email "your@email.here"
git status
git add filename
git add -all # stage all files
git add -u # only modified and deleted files
git add
ed. It will open an editor for writing a commit message. If saved, the commit will be created.
git commit # this opens up your default text editor
git commit -m "Commit messge" # this doesn't open up your editor
git push origin master