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microstrain_3dm_gx5_45

Description

Interface software, including ROS node, for Microstrain 3DM-GX5-45.

The interface makes use of the MIP SDK Version 1.1 from Microstrain to communicate with the device. Includes the following applications:

  • GX4-45_Test : A port of the executable that comes with the SDK including minimial changes in the way the serial port is specified. Running {rosrun microstrain_3dm_gx5_45 GX4-45_Test /dev/ttyACM0 115200} should run the tests on a unit as a first step.
  • microstrain_3dm_gx5_45 : ROS node

Dependencies

Build instructions.

The concept is to build this drive along with the Microstrain SDK (Version 1.1). Currently the repo contains the SDK files, but in the future, it might make sense to not include them - or to substitute a newer version.
Here are the steps I took to build the code...

  • Dowload the zip archive "MIP C Code Sample for Windows and Linux Version 1.1" from the Microstrain website
  • Extract the archive into the directory "MIPSDK". The first directory in MIPSDK should be "C"
  • In C/Library/User Functions/mip_sdk_user_functions.c, comment out the line "#include <windows.h>
  • cd catkin_sw
  • catkin_make

Dev Notes

The mip_sdk_user_functions are C functions that need to be called by various parts of the SDK. The main purpose of these functions is to implement the platform-specific serial (RS232) port elements. The prototype serial port open function takes the COM number as an integer input - which is clunky for Linux serial ports. Changed this to take a string defining the port (e.g., /dev/ttyS0), but this necessitated also modifying the mip_sdk_interface.[ch] files, since this is what is called by the application - changed the mip_interface_init function to accept a string argument for specifying the port.