Software tools used in ROMI: a quick look into some of the tools used to develop ROMI

The following video describes ROMI's principles and methods for designing with free and open source software and hardware. Funded by EU Grant 773875.

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Video script:

(BARBERAN) ROMI develops open tools for farming communities. But I prefer not to say open tools I prefer to say ‘free’ tools. Free not as in ‘Gratis’, not as in it doesn't have a cost, but as in ‘freedom’ you know because it's not the same. And and I think we all in ROMI project agree that we are more in the side of ‘free’ as in ‘freedom’ than in ‘open’ as in you can see what I do. It's more that I can do this, and you can use it for whatever you want and modify it as you want.

Hi, I'm Victor, I'm an industrial designer here at the Fab LaN in Barcelona, and I work mostly work developing hardware and software. So the idea is that using free tools gives you control of what you do, so we try to do all the chain, all the the flow with with open source tools, with free tools. So we use Linux that's a free operative system, that anyone can download and use on their own computers. It's installable in any type of computer in any type of TV, in most watches. Super computers use Linux all over the world on top of Linux we use different tools to do the different tasks. We use ‘Blender’ for example for modelling Blender is a tool that can do a lot of tough animation 3D modelling, 3D sculpting Etc. And here we use it like for a strange thing like designing robots, but it's a really nice tool for even design stuff like this, the cabling then all the mechanical parts etc.

Then for doing the in fact the electronic boards we use a ‘kiCAD’ that's a really nice software to design electronic boards we do all the electronic design here and we produce the boards later. We try to keep it in a way that boards can be produced locally but not always easy depending on the type of task that you want to do.

We're using ‘Inscape’ like a normal open source and free drawing program that anyone can use. And we replace tools that cost a lot of money, and that you cannot customise to do whatever you want. For a coding we try to also keep using only three tools. So it depends on on it's a personal choice, I use ‘VIM’. We use all the the libraries developed by the Arduino project, that's a free really important free software project. We use platform IO, another set of tools to organise libraries to set up stuff to compile, to upload code to different processors.

We use a lot of libraries developed by a lot of people all over the world with different interests. Libraries to control motors, libraries to read sensors, libraries to do whatever kind of things people have faced in their own tasks. The people write the library and share it so we got it, and if we see some problems we improve it, or we change it, and we re-share it again. So people can reuse whatever we are doing you know at the end this kind of projects are public money, and there's one model that's being promoted that is; ‘public money, public code’. You know, so it's a more or less the idea that we try to push.

Everything I just showed to you in my computer, you can install it in yours because it's free and you can download all the models and all the code and modify it by yourself to build your own robots, and customise them to your own use. All the process that we do it's important, because at the end there's a lot of knowledge being generated we tested a lot of different motors with a lot of different open source and free controllers, and we document all the process so people can get advantage of that work. Here for example so we we use a remote controller and we try different remote controllers and we test the stability Etc and we document all the tests that we do and how we solve the problem in terms of code in terms of electronics in terms of algorithms etc. In since we are adapting for example we are adapting a mouse sensor to measure the position on top of the cable, then we do a lot of experimentation and if we document that experiment people can get advantage of it. Not of the final product but of the process that we did. Because people learn how to use that Mouse sensors to do different stuff.