MultiVehicleTool

Tool to control Anki vehicles using AnkiDrive SDK.

Hardware

You need a working Bluetooth 4.0 Dongle (BTLE capable). hciconfig should give an output like this:

hci0:   Type: BR/EDR  Bus: USB
    BD Address: 5C:F3:70:65:4C:EB  ACL MTU: 1021:8  SCO MTU: 64:1
    UP RUNNING
    RX bytes:159679 acl:5344 sco:0 events:1104 errors:0
    TX bytes:12871 acl:505 sco:0 commands:329 errors:0

If the device is marked as down you need to set it up using sudo hciconfig hci0 up

Dependencies

glib-2 and readline

Install via your favorite package manager

sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libreadline-dev libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-thread-dev

Building

This build relies on a current Bluez version which is included as a submodule. So you need to fetch this using --recursive.

git clone --recursive gitlab@novgit05.novero.com:rstrac/multiVehicleTool.git
cd multiVehicleTool
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Capabilities

To set BLE connection parameters the user needs some special privileges which are called capabilities on linux. If you run the program as root or via sudo you can just start the program.

Else you need to set the capabilities of the binary by issuing the following command:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin+eip multiVehicleTool

The cmake configuration is trying to do this automatically. This why it will ask you to provide your password if you are not root. You can surpress this step by passing -D NOSETCAP=YES to the cmake command. (useful for automated builds)

Caveats

Your filesystem needs to support capabilities. Know working is ext4. Definitely not working are most "remote filesystems" like smbfs or hgfs (VMWare Shared Folder). Additionally your filesystem needs to be mounted allowing suid. So if you see a nosuid flag when you issue a mount command this will not work.

You can check if multiVehicleTool is running with the correct capabilities by issuing the following command after starting it:

getpcaps $(pidof multiVehicleTool)
#Capabilities for `104234': = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+ep

Running

If you have set capabilities just start the program like this:

./multiVehicleTool

After starting the tool you have to scan for vehicles using the

scan

command. If your HCI device is working correctly you should see a list of available vehicles, it should look like this:

[    Broadcast (0)]> scan
1475229008.232: Scanning for bluetooth low-energy devices using hci0
1475229008.262: Discovered FC:49:C7:17:BE:62 GROUNDSHOCK0 [v2774] (unknown d75c)

You can select the vehicle either by its name

select-vehicle GROUNDSHOCK0

or by its macaddress

select FC:49:C7:BE:62

Once the vehicle is selected, you can then connect to it

connect 

and upon successful connection start sending commands to the vehicle. Some commands to try

set-speed 500
set-speed 0
change-lane 100 1000 6
uturn

If you have a vehicle collection file in the same directory (see as an example inputs/vehiclePoolDefaults.json) you can skip the scan and connect directly to the vehicle via its name

connect VEHICLE_NAME

The program has the ability to run a preprogrammed sequence of commands. As an example for how this works see the file inputs/get_started.drive. You can either pipe this file directly into multiVehicleTool by running

./multiVehicleTool < inputs/get_started.drive

or by calling

execute inputs/get_started.drive

directly inside multiVehicleTool.

For more options regarding supported commands call 'help' inside multiVehicleTool.