bonjour bruce

After a longer hiatus due to our giant keyboard project, I'm back fiddling with bruce.

Today, I learned an important lesson about RTAI, which the wiki as well as Paolo Mantegazza from RTAI helped to solve: Once a thread becomes real-time-scheduled, you need to explicitly pass control to the scheduler. Otherwise it will preempt any lower-priorised task (which, in my case, meant more or less everything including network traffic...)

Paolo showed me a way to overcome this in my current API/Application design. I hopefully can try that out tomorrow.

Additionally, I began thinking about and exploring bonjour, and it's linux incarnation - avahi. I will use the excellent Pyro to communicate with the robot itself, controlling it and publishing position feedback. But to discover it, the pyro-nsd seems to be a bit more limited or unconvenient than I want it.

So far, it seems to work rather nice, I can advertise a new service under linux. Now I need to figure out how to

• get rid of the glib-mainloop in the avahi demo-code
• find the service from OSX
• communicate the pyro URI over bonjour

But I'm pretty positive none of the above will impose any greater hardship.

Stay tuned...