NEAT Documentation

How simple some things sound.

As mentioned before, I have a Windows version is NEAT, which I have converted to visual studio 2008. however it doesn't come with any documentation, to speak of. There is however a sentence which directs the user to the documentation, in Linux version of the NEAT code.

Downloading the code is easy enough, but of course it comes in a Gzip package, so first I needed a Linux computer to unzip the package. Not a problem, I recently bought a ASUS EeePC. I unziped the package and transferred it to full sized Vista laptop. (In case you don't know the EeePC is a sub-notebook with a 7" screen. And it has no C compiler.

It turns out that the documentation is in a Postscript file. A wonderful format for most of the world, but of course on Windows you have to pay someone Mega$$ to read it! And of course my printer is not a postscript printer.

Next, try reading the file on the sub-notebook. The file is 17 pages, and too wide to display at a legible font size on the 7" EeePC screen without scrolling sideways to read each line ... hardly conducive to digesting 17 pages of technical info! Setting up printing to a network printer on a Windows network is beyond me, and once again I failed. (One of these days I will set up a Linux network server, and solve the issue of different OSs).

How do I turn a post script file into something I can read on Windows? Google is your friend! It isn't long before I find a utility that can print a postcript file on Vista. Wonderful.

Download.

Install.

Run.

Error Message. " You are trying to print a Postscript file to a non-postscript printer".

Well YES!!@*!

Back to google. I found a wonderful site that will convert a Postscript file into a Portable Document File (PDF), just upload it and download the result. It took a few attempts, probably because I didn't read the instructions!

Finally I print the documentation. Success.

Next of course I need to understand it. But this has taken the whole evening, and I am too tired now. I should go to bed ... what is on TV?

Microsoft Robotics Studio

Microsoft's robotic studio may well be another way of Microsoft trying to gain a monopoly, it would seem churlish not to at least check it out. In any case, people ask about, so could be good idea to be informed.

Microsoft visual studio includes a simulated P3-DX, so it seems, at first appearance, that it might actually be useful tool of this project. However running the simulator is not very intuitive.

When starting Pioneer 3DX stimulation, a 3-D scene appears reminiscent VRML type display, The simulated robot has bumpers and 16 sensors, so it would have to be changed to match our robots. When the simulation starts, the type window appears showing the loading of the robot. There is also the scene that had mentioned, and the dashboard, which can be used to control the robot. Using the dashboard is not intuitive.


These are the steps that need to be performed to use the dashboard:
1. Enter the computer name, the localhost is supposed to work, but doesn't seem to.
2. Enter the port number, which is one more than the port number shown in the console type window mentioned earlier.
3. Press the connect button. If this is successful, there will be two lines of text, looking like rather obscure directories, and appears in a large box below.
4. Next, you must double-click the line that contains the word motors, to turn the motors on. Left of that box there is a label indicating whether the motors on off.
5. Once the motors are on you can press the button labelled Drive.
6. Now you may use the 'sphere' above the stop button to drive the robot. (If you happen to have a joystick you can use that, but I have never owned one.)


You can turn the laser on and see a representation of the computers laser vision at the bottom of the dashbord. The dashboard is shown in the picture above. Here is a picture of the simulated environment, showing the obstacles that the laser vision is picking up. Unfortunately the Uni only has one laser range finder to share between the five robots, so I am planning to do this project without lasers.

Also you can change the camera view to robot eye view. Apart from that, the basic simulation is not very interesting. If the robots are one of this her a call or cylindrical obstacles they roll off to infinity, as if there is no friction in this environment.

I have yet to determine whether this is going to be a useful simulation environment or not. If I do use this tool, it will beat to work on Vision Systems, so the physics won't be particularly important.

Visual Studio Gymnastics

Well it turns out that visual studio 2003 doesn't work on Vista, and is not going to be supported. It just wouldn't work and in the end I had to uninstall it, you forget how many hours it took to install.

Obviously I scanned have used a 2008 after all, is searching on the Web founder couple ways that might get it to work. Next stage was that she trying to use visual studio which is slightly less than intuitive. OK I could write a "Hello World" program, though in the existing projects turned out to be problematic. But after few days everything was hunky-dory.

For one thing when opening the project from an earlier version, don't try opening visual studio first, and then browsing to the project files from within the program it won't open them. On the other hand, opening of projects files from the Windows directory causes visual studio to convert it to the current version.

Another problem I had was something that was a registered bug in visual studio 2008, after spending the day trying to find a solution to that,, I went looking for another solution. I eventually found the Visual Studio 2005 Express Version download page hidden away on Microsoft's Web site.

Using 2005 learned more lot more about conversion programmes from other versions of Visual Studio, and about the aria operating system in particular. It looked like I'd found the solution.

The next step was to convert the neat program to visual studio 2005. Once again ran into problems, NEAT had numerous compilation errors in 2005, and not just undeclared variables. I converted the NEAT code to Visual Studio 2008, and I was able to compile at once I'd fixed at the undeclared variables. I returned to trying to convert the Aria code to 2008 and eventually had success.

Having eventually compile the code the next step was to get it to run on robots. After a number of attempts, we found a utility that allows 2008 code to run on the robots. In fact we were able to run both the 2005 and the 2008 code.

Success at last!

Next, actually writing my own code, the body of my project.