Notes about driver-installation and configuration for using the Shadow-hand with the PCI-bus CAN-controller card.

Introduction

The original PC supplied by Shadow robot is very slow overall, but uses a motherboard with VIA-chipset and special EPP parallel-port modes. This is used by the driver for the proprietary Shadow parallel-port CAN-bus dongle. To improve performance and reliability, we wanted to switch our setup to a standard PCI-bus CAN-bus controller.

The CAN-bus card in question is from PEAK Systems, www.peak-system.com. Linux drivers and documentation are available from their website at http://www.peak-system.com/fileadmin/media/linux/index.htm

Documentation about the current socketcan network-device kernel stuff is on file:///usr/src/linux/Documentation/networking/can.txt

Building and driver installation:

• download the driver. At the time of writing, latest version was 7.2
• download the driver manual.
• create a new empty directory, unpack the driver tar.gz archive
• compile the driver, with netdev support enabled:
  make NET=NETDEV_SUPPORT
• if necessary, change the file permissions so that root can read
• sudo make install
• check that the modules (e.g. "pcan.ko") are installed under /lib/modules/<kernel>/... and that the udev rules have been installed.
• sudo modprobe pcan
• sudo ifconfig can0 up (net-dev devices, no entry under /dev)
• if necessary, check that everything works:
  dmesg
  ifconfig
  cat /proc/pcan
  ls /dev/pcan0 /dev/pcan1 (old-style char-devices)

Utilities: socketcan-utils

• download the socketcan-utils von berlios.de:
  svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/socketcan/trunk
• the device tree contains driver, kernel-patches, docs, and utilities
• candump utility:
  cd can-utils
  make
  ./candump can0
• test utilities:
  cd test
  make
  ./tst-rcv-own-msgs can0

Download and setup of the Shadow software

• see AJMs documentation at file:///informatik/isr/tams/projects/robotSW/
• setup Linux and RTAI patch
• download Shadow trunk from their CVS:
  cvs -d :pserver:anonymouse@shadowrobot.dyndns.org:/cvs login
  sudo cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymouse@shadowrobot.dyndns.org:/dvs checkout hand
• edit /usr/sorc/hand/Config.mk and select the entries matching our configuration
  SOCKETCAN=1
  PCAN=1
• Shadow provides a semi-automatic setup via the following script:

   -> /usr/src/hand/scripts/setup_system.sh

• compile the Shadow software.
• Edit /etc/robot/interface and include one (hand) or two (hand+arm) lines for the PCAN adapter:
  0 pcan_hand hand
  1 pcan_hand hand
• Copy the template startup-script from /usr/src/hand/rc.robot.socketcan to /etc/init.d/robot and modify to match the actual configuration.

History

• 07.07.2011 - first entries