Team AIBO

Brian Bentow - Yu-min Kim - Joshua Lewis

Introduction Set Up Progress Responsibilities
Software Hardware

Wireless

How do you enable wireless networking so you can get debugging info from the AIBO?

The AIBO has a wireless network card that allows you to get at its valuable debugging output. In order to get to this output, you need to be able to connect to the AIBO using (telnet AIBOIPaddr 59000).

The firewall for CINE, the HMC wireless network, is configured such that all incoming connections are blocked. Therefore, we cannot simply have the AIBO on CINE and connect to it using the "normal" Mudd network and Ethernet LAN card. However, two nodes on that network can converse. Therefore, one must install a wireless card on the linux box so it too can be on CINE. Unfortunately, it is a royal pain to install a wireless card in linux except for possibly an Orinoco gold card which we did not try. We tried a Linksys wireless G v4 card and a program called driverloader which uses the windows driver to no avail.

Solution

We bought a wireless router with 4 LAN ports. We added static DHCP entries for both the AIBO and machine so that they will be assigned their corresponding static IP addresses. We used the LAN Ethernet card on the linux box, because we could get this working, and plugged it into one of the wireless router LAN ports. The connected the uplink to the wall Ethernet port. We added a virtual server entry in the router config tool so that we can ssh into the box. It would also be possible to connect to the AIBO from the "normal" Mudd network by setting up some virtual servers for the AIBO.

  1. Talked to Roger Weicham who would not add a rule to the CINE firewall to give us access to the AIBO
  2. Bought and returned wireless G card - it was way too hard to configure in linux
  3. Bought router - Requires a little bit of extra setup but works great

wlanconf.txt

USE_DHCP=1
ESSID=aibonet
WEPENABLE=0
#WEPKEY=
APMODE=1
CHANNEL=8

Memory Stick

Requirements

According to numerous warnings, the memory stick must be an official Sony AIBO Programming Memory Stick (PMS). Note that this is not the stick that comes with the AIBO, it must be ordered separately. Also, it is recommended that you use only official Sony memory stick readers.

Setup

You must format you memory stick as FAT32. Then use the "make newstick" command in your Tekkotsu directory to get the basic required files onto it. Finally, after building your CMPack behavior, run "stickit -a" to copy this behavior to the memory stick. Note that stickit assumes that the memory stick will mount to /memstick. To guarantee this, add the following line to your /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1		/memstick 		vfat	rw,user,noauto	0 0