Quickstart Guide

Quickstart Guide - Driving a Robot

This guide covers running Dawn and using it to drive a base kit.

Installation

Follow the instructions on the main Software Hub for downloading and installing Dawn.

Dawn has a built in interactive guided tour for beginners. You can start the tour by clicking the “Tour” button in the upper-right corner of Dawn (highlighted in red below).

Connecting to your robot

Step 1: Turn on your team’s router by connecting it to power (PDB or wall socket). Ensure the ethernet port on the router is connected to the ethernet port on your team’s Raspberry Pi via ethernet cable.

Step 2: Connect your computer to the router over WiFi (note that the router may take up to a minute to boot). The network will be named after your team number: “Team#”. The password is printed on the back side of your router, 8 digits at the bottom right.

Step 3: Turn on your robot. Ensure that both the green and orange lights on the ethernet port of the Raspberry Pi are on (blinking is fine). If not, unplug then replug the cable.

Step 4: Press the button in Dawn to configure your robot IP

Step 5: Type your robot IP address. It will be of the form 192.168.0.1XX, substituting your two-digit team number for XX. For example, team 1 will have an address ending in 101.

Step 6: Dawn will start displaying peripheral information once you are successfully connected.

If Dawn fails to connect, try restarting your robot. (You should not need to restart the wifi router, although if powered via PDB then it’ll restart anyway).

Connecting a controller

To drive your robot, you will need to plug in an Xbox controller. Dawn will only detect the Xbox controller once you press a button on it.

The “Gamepads” section in Dawn originally looks like this:

And here is what it looks like after plugging in a gamepad and pressing a button:

Template code

Copy-paste the following code into Dawn. Be sure to substitute your motor device IDs into the top two lines of the code.

left_motor = "YOUR MOTOR ID HERE"
right_motor = "YOUR MOTOR ID HERE"
def autonomous():
    print("Autonomous mode has started")
    Robot.run(autonomous_actions)
    while True:
        pass

def autonomous_actions():
    print("Autonomous action sequence started")
    await Actions.sleep(1.0)
    print("1 second has passed in autonomous mode")

def teleop():
    print("Tele-operated mode has started")
    while True:
        if Gamepad.get_value("joystick_right_y") > 0.5:
            Robot.set_value(left_motor, "velocity_a", -0.5)
            Robot.set_value(right_motor, "velocity_a", -0.5)
        else:
            Robot.set_value(left_motor, "velocity_a", 0)
            Robot.set_value(right_motor, "velocity_a", 0)

After you have added the code, Dawn will look something like the following. Motor IDs were copied from right panel in Dawn.

Running the code

To run your code, perform the follow sequence of steps:

1. Save your file
2. Upload the saved file
3. Run the uploaded file
4. Press the “Toggle Console”

The console panel will display the results of print statements in your code. A “Tele-operated mode has started!” message will be printed once the sample code runs.

IMPORTANT: The "Run" button does not upload code, and the "Upload" button uploads your last saved code! Remember to always press Save-Upload-Run in sequence.

When you pull the right thumb-stick on your controller backwards, the robot should drive. You may need to flip the negative signs in the code above to get it to drive in the correct direction.