[sudo-discuss] robot programming format deciphered

[Jake]

so I was able to use a primitive magnetic encoding sequencer to read robot 
programs from a flat magnetic tape.

We had some antique (literally 25 years old) diskettes in the computer 
history museum, and I fed one to the robot, and then "saved" all the 
programs written so far to the "diskette"

then, i used a mechanical diskette-reader for a desktop computer (which 
needed lubrication on its rusty motors and slides and quite a bit of 
fiddling to work) to read this magnetic tape "diskette"

the filesytem format is nothing recognized by 'mount' so i was forced to 
simply dd the binary of the diskette's image to a file.  I have posted the 
file here:

http://spaz.org/~jake/robot/robofloppy.2

and then i edited that with vim to extract the programs within.

here is a simple program that makes 7 poses, and repeats:

http://spaz.org/~jake/robot/baby.txt

this is a more raw version of all the jobs i found on the disk image, 
including some fragmentation.  I don't understand the filesystem format, 
so it's just luck that so many of the files were intact in one piece.

http://spaz.org/~jake/robot/jobs.txt

as you can see, a program is a list of coordinates (the six hardware axes 
of the robot arm) and then a program referring to those coordinates.  it 
can be more complicated than that of course, for example when we start 
using base or robot coordinates for 3d printing, but here it is anyway.

this stuff is documented in this PDF:

http://spaz.org/~jake/robot/479236-17-Communications.pdf

and also, i think we might find the serial communications format used by 
the "diskette drive" to communicate with the robot, so we can skip the 
magnetic media entirely and send programs directly to the robot over 
serial.

please let me know if you're interested in this stuff and want to try 
something.

-jake