Let's start right away with an example and sum up the parts of the last controller I was working on with Orocos:

• Industrial Single Board Computer (SBC) (PIV 3.4GHz) with 11 PCI slots. Brand: Amplicon, Type: Ventrix 4003
• National Instruments PCI cards: NI 6602, NI 6713, NI 6503 for counters, analog output and relays respectively, supported by Comedi
• RTL 10/100 ethernet card, supported by RTNet.

It's been 4 years and I still remember it. Herman sent me a link to a robotics project which was really worth looking at. It had the uninspirational name 'Ptolemy II' and the web page, well, let's say I felt finger-pointed at by a certain Greek. Using words like 'Java' and Real-Time in the same sentence made me (at that time) drop my chin upon my chest, rubbing my forehead and shaking my head in a 'no' manner.

During my never-ending search for robotics related hard- and software, I frequently stumble on (competing) 'products' which are interesting for sharing. Looking at my previous blog entries, it looks like I'm too much staring at my belly, which is for most robotisits out there of less interest than the vast web of information on our fingertips.

Yesterday, I attended the OMG's Seminar on Robotics in Brussels, Belgium (that's Europe for you). It was quite turbulent at moments, as there was not yet a consensus on what the standard on the 'Robot Technology Components' (RTC) should look like. Hall-way discussions made me miss out on the OpenRTM-aist presentation (Open Robotics Middlewarei). Well, I hope the organisers put the presentation soon on-line.

I was first filled with joy when I read the press release of the
'open sourceing' of NASA's ROVER software,
CLARAty.
Last time I saw a presentation about this software was at the robot software development track at ICRA '05 in Barcelona. A question from the audience ( ok, it was me) was raised where this software could be downloaded. The answer was that it would be made available soon, possibly under the GPL or a similar license.

Today, two years later, reading the release notes, it seemed all very promissing as planning and device driver software became available to the Linux robotics
community. Well, promissing, yes, delivering: no. According to the
license,
CLARAty is incompatiblewith the GPL. CLARAty can not be used for commercial activities:

(quote from their website:)

The Software shall not be used for commercial production or
sale of any commercial product or derivative incorporating the Software.
Should the user desire to use the Software for any such commercial
purpose, the user must contact the Office of Technology Transfer at
Caltech to obtain permissions and pay the appropriate royalty

The reason that CLARAty is incompatible with the GPL is that it is too restrictive. Licenses that take away user rights are not compatible with licenses, such as the GPL that enforce user rights.
Don't waste your time on that software as you may not use it with other GPL software.

I've been hacking on the DeploymentComponent such that it can load components dynamically. This is RTT 1.2.0 only though(*). The idea just elaborated on the current XML description for creating data porti connections between components. Now the XML file lists also which component is created from which library and which thread to assign to it. This greatly reduces recompilation steps, as a single executable is capable of launching all Orocos applications, by only reading the XML.

So this weekend was FOSDEM, two days of more than a dozen parallel tracks about various FOSS topics. My first impression was that almost twice the amount of people showed up this year, making it a huge success, and sometimes very crowded dev rooms. The flu pandemic got me unfortunately this weekend, and although I could fight and stand it on Saturday, I paid my price today with being at home mainly in bed.

The main purpose of Orocos.org is provide a central information point for users and developers. Drupal helps a lot in realising this, by providing access to many types of content. Recently, registered users can manage their Orocos or Orocos-dev mailing list subscriptions through this site. A nice feature, but not as powerful as having the messages of the lists right here on-line, searchable and reply-able. Drupal has a mailman-Forum module which claims to do that trick. The main concern is limiting SPAM of course and a captcha module may prove to be necessary.

From day 1, I am a visitor of the annual Free and Open Source Developer's Meeting in Brussels. This conference has gained much respect because each year, the organisers succeed in attracting some big guys from the Free world. I had the honour to present 2 times a topic on the 'embedded track' as well. No talks have yet been announced on this track, but I've reserved my seat already :-)

I'll be there again this year so if you want to meet, drop me a note. FOSDEM is completely free (except from food and beer) and is an excellent place for networking.

The last month of development was relatively calm. The main discovery was a bug in the important AtomicQueue class. A fix has been commited, but a more memory efficient implementation remains work in progress. Normally, RTT 1.0.2 will be released next week.

My main focus for the coming months is an internal application for Orocos, thus no big features are planned for the RTT. A CAN library was contributed
though, which allows to invoke real-time commands and read/write data over a CAN network between Orocos Components.