The scripts in this repo are for reading, storing, parsing, filtering and plotting the byte-packets used for communication by the Dynamixel series of digital servos created by Robotis.

The scripts currently can handle the full instruction set used for talking to Dynamixel servos, and supports the settings for various Dynamixel devices. Currently supported devices are:

AX-12, AX-12W, AX-18, AX-S1, RX-24, RX-28, RX-64, MX-28, MX-64, MX-106, EX-106

There are four scripts with different purposes, and which use each other to various extents. These are divided into two groups; those that the user interacts with, and those that are used internally.

User-friendly:

pydysetup

Sets up a directory for use of the other scripts by creating a default pydypackets.cfg file.

pydylogger

Monitoring serial port and saving packets to file

pydyparser

Filtering lists of packets by ID, instruction, or command bytes

pydyplotter

Creating plots from packets; e.g. plots of each servo's position

Each of these scripts can be called from the command line with various options. For more info, try ScriptName -h

This software should be installed as a package for Python 2.7. To do this, download/clone the repository, and then run:

python setup.py install

(If you are on Windows, make sure that C:\Python27\Scripts is in your PATH variable)

The first thing that needs to be done is to create a config file. To do this invoke pydysetup, which will create pydypackets.cfg in your current directory. The other scripts will raise an error if this file does not exist in the current directory or in a subfolder named Config. (Having a global config file is on the TODO list.)

Within the config file, various settings can be found. To start, set the serial/COM port being used for your setup. Note that the port specification is OS dependent. Once you have a config file, you can run stuff!

The steps for a couple of envisioned typical use cases are:

1. Connect computer to a Dynamixel bus, and save bytes using PyDyLogger.py
2. Feed the output file into PyDyParser.py with various flags (-t -> human readable output)
3. Read the filtered output file in a text editor

Or:

1. Connect computer to a Dynamixel bus, and save bytes using PyDyLogger.py
2. Feed the output file into PyDyPlotter.py with various flags and diagnose problems via plots

Python 2.7 should be installed. (3.x is not supported)

You will need the following packages, installed e.g. via pip:

• pyserial

Plotting capabilities use MatPlotLib.

http://matplotlib.org/

Derived from needs discussed here:

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?5670-Dynamixel-packet-analyzer

https://github.com/RyanLowerr/Dynamixel-Python