Procedure for calibrating the Cyton with the viewer?

[Dean Salvadore]

The Cyton view tha came with the robot alwys parked the arm straight
up.
The 2010 installer parks the arm in a bent position.
My arm does not match the 2010 installer view and my attempts to
calibrate it did not work.

Is there a way to calibrate the viewer with the real world arm?

Thank you;

Dean

[Runi Kovoor]

Hi Dean,

Below are the instructions to calibrate the viewer with your real arm.

When performing the calibration, all of the joints are essentially set
midway between their min and max joint limit. The pitch joints are easy -
you want the joints in an extended (straight up) position. For the revolute
joints, it is not as obvious and you might need to use the Manipulator
Configurator slider to determine the general midpoint location and then
visually align the joint at its mechanical 0 degree point. Correspondence
between the viewer and actual hardware requires you to have the bases
oriented the same. Make sure that the viewer and the physical hardware
bases are aligned when performing calibration.

1. Go back to the original cytonConfig.xml (This is located in the bin
directory where the viewer is installed). There should be a
cytonConfig.xml.bak created after calibration as a backup. Otherwise you
can pull a pristine version from the installer.
2. Start up the viewer and align the bases. Make note of what the arm looks
like in the viewer in the init position. Open up the Manipulator
Configuration dialog and move the sliders until the physical arm looks like
what the viewer version looked like in its initial position. In the
Edit->Configure dialog press the calibrate button and press OK for both
dialogs. Close down the viewer and save off that version of the
cytonConfig.xml.

Now when you start up the viewer again, the arm should be calibrated with
the viewer. The critical thing is that if the cytonConfig.xml is not synced
to the hardware, nothing is going to work as expected.

Thanks a lot,
Runi

[Dean Salvadore]

Hello Runi;
Thank you for the reply.
Here is what I did to calibrate it.

I looked up the board and downloaded the Lynx Term app for fun.
It is good for seeing the first 7 servos but and communicating with
the arm.
After getting familiar with the syntax I set my terminal application
to communicate directly and set the local echo on to see what I was
typing.
I set all channels to the centerpoint which is:
#0 P1500 S1000
#channel (0-7 for the cyton) Ppoints or range 750 to 2250 min to max,
S is speed 100 is slow 1000 medium 10000 very fast

With each servo centered at 1500 I fired up the viewer and moved the
redering to center with the sliders.

Saved the session and saved init and calibrate.
The arm is now perfectly calibrated.

I ran in to a couple issues:
cytonConfig.xml did not change so I edited it myself and set the
initPulse to 1500 for each servo.
That worked just fine.

The Save as option for cyton.ecz gave me a "bad token error" for some
reason so I just saved it over the top. Attempts to save it to a
diferent name and load it ran into the same error.

Now I on to getting familit with the API.

Cheers!
Dean Salvadore

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