Mini-Hubo First moves with Keith's Code

The best way to start a LabVIEW program is to start from existing code. I knew that Keith Sevcik one of my colleagues from DASL made a basic communication with Dynamixels using LabVIEW. Keith's program was built for a specific reason actuating the 3 axes of the Gantry Pan, Tilt, and Yaw camera mount. I am also a very visual learner, so I dissected his code probing it to understand the the basics of Dynamixel communication. To find out more on the Dynamixel I wrote a post on it when I was in Korea Designing the ATLAS Humanoid. I ran my phone bill through the roof for January, picking Keith brain on the way it worked (Thanks Keith!) I created a basic Tutorial in layman's terms on how the 8 bit communication works and the Dynamixel control table. I guess the biggest challenge for me was understanding the CheckSUM and calculating the length. At the end of the communication string of characters, an area adds up the data verifying that the full length was received by the device. Also calculation of the length had a formula that counted the motors and another length parameter. I was coming up short when I tried to calculated it by hand, took me a while to wrap my head around this concept. These two points in mind pushed me in my future code revisions to make the code calculate these internally to allow for expandability and elimination of error.

~Keith's code gave me a Control that I could reference anytime I made new changes. His code worked first time with communication with the Dynamixel!