Real-time System Lab - COEN421

The real-time system laboratory is located in H867. The laboratory is equipped with seven sets of real-time systems. Each set includes a Windows workstation, Niryo Ned2, its carousel, and a Raspberry Pi4, as pictured below.

 

Lab information

  • Room: H867
  • Door-code: (for TAs only)
  • 7 Niryo Ned2 robots with conveyor belt.
  • Seats: the room can occupy 6 groups, e.g. about 12 seats.

Real-time Windows Workstation

In the lab, a real-time development host is a Windows machine running Windows 10 64bit OS. On this host, some application tools are installed:

  • QNX Software Development Platform (SDP), includes the QNX Momentics tool suite. QNX Momentics is a complete QNX Neutrino development environment.
  • Matlab/Simulink
  • Niryo Studio, a graphical HMI. It allows fast and direct control of Ned with an external workstation. Its purpose is to provide users with a complete and simple interface for Ned motion, programming environments, and the current status of Ned.
  • Syder IDE, Anaconda is one of the most popular distributions that allows programming in R and Python. It has multiple packages, such as PyCharm, RStudio, Jupyter Notebook, and Spyder. We encourage you to use Spyder IDE for Python programming in this lab. Its current version is Python 3.9.

Target System – Raspberry Pi 4 Model-B

  • Hardware specification: Processor: Broadcom BCM2711, quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8), 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz Memory: 4GB LPDDR4
  • Embedded Real-time System: QNX v7.1 Installed.

Niryo Ned2 with Conveyor belt

Niryo Ned2 is a six-axis collaborative robot based on open-source technologies. It is intended for education, research, and Industry 4.0. This collaborative robot is based on Ubuntu 18.04 and ROS (Robot Operating System) Melodic, an open-source solution created for robotics. Through ROS, Ned2 has multiple libraries allowing the user to conceive many programs, from the most simple to the most complex ones, responding then, in a flexible way, to the user’s needs. 

Niryo Conveyor Belt is Ned2, it can be used to move small objects in two directions with an adjustable speed to simulate a production line automation.