How I got the Scribbler 2 robot with a Fluke 2 board working on Mac OS X

Resources

• Modeling and Robots—on a Mac!
• Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE), makers of the Fluke II upgrade module
• I purchased mine from BetterBots

Steps

1. Start-up Guide (shipped with Scribbler II) – Play around with the demo modes. I couldn’t try the USB interface because I didn’t buy the USB-to-serial converter…oops. However, the Fluke 2 board obviates the need for it.
2. Follow the instructions at the IPRE wiki to download and install Calico (a framework for programming).
3. Follow the instructions at http://quantumprogress.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/modeling-and-robots-on-a-mac/ to set up bluetooth.
4. Do a firmware upgrade.
   I had trouble creating a custom tty port to use, so I left my original “/dev/tty.Fluke2-05FB-Fluke2” and in the terminal typed:

   cd /dev
   sudo ln -s tty.Fluke2-05FB-Fluke2 tty.scribbler
   

   You will need to replace “05FB” with whatever you see when you type ls -l /dev/tty.* from Terminal.app. Then I could type in the StartCalico.app:

   from firmwareupgrade import *
   upgrade("fluke", port="/dev/tty.scribbler")
   upgrade("scribbler")
   

5. Initialize the robot (from the StartCalico.app using Myro):

   from Myro import *
   init("/dev/tty.scribbler") 
   

Now, according to Matt Greenwolfe, the next step is to write low-level movement routines that use the wheel encoders.