[Playerstage-developers] recent changes

[brian g. <bg...@po...>]

hi all,

  first of all, big thanks to John and company at UMass for contributing
their K-Team drivers and for making the build more modular.  i hadn't
maintained support for leaving each driver out at compile-time because it's so
damned tedious, but it's not so tedious when someone else does it!

i've just had a run through the server and C++ client code; here are the
highlights:

  - I've unified device interfaces.  For example, we now have neither a
    "REB_power" interface nor an "RWI_power" interface nor a "P2OS_power"
    interface.  Rather, we have a single "power" interface, and 3 different
    drivers that support it.  As a consequence, there are no "REB_POWER_CODE"
    or related macros.  All client-side device interaction is by generic
    interface.

  - As a corollary, various driver-specific ioctl()s have had their names
    changed (and often their values reassigned) in order to become part of the
    generic interface.  For example, the "position" interface now includes a
    half-dozen or so extra ioctl()s that are currently only supported by the
    "reb_position" driver.  That's fine; in general a driver will only support
    a subset of an interface's ioctl()s.

  - As a second corollary, i've condensed the C++ client proxies according to
    interface.  There is no longer an "REBPositionProxy" class nor an
    "RWIPositionProxy" class, but rather a single "PositionProxy" class that
    can interact with any "position" device and that includes methods to
    invoke all the relevant ioctl()s.

    I made some judgement calls in condensing the proxies, and i may have axed
    your favorite method along the way.  If so, feel free to add it back.

    Your C++ client code will have to change a bit, but not too much, in order
    to use the generic proxies instead of the specific ones.  This may be a
    little tedious now, but in the long-term, it's very cool, because a Player
    client program that uses the "PositionProxy," for example, can
    transparently control *any* position device, regardless of the underlying
    driver in use.

    btw, every ClientProxy object now has a public field "driver_name" with
    the string name of the driver in use.

  - There's a new interface, called "ir", for infra-red arrays.  It's much
    like "sonar", but its data contains an auxillary array of voltages in
    addition to ranges, so i left it separate.

  - The WiFi driver is built by default.

  - For position drivers that want to do position (instead of speed) control,
    the position command packet includes full (planar) 3-DOF state, so the
    'xpos' and 'ypos' fields can be used, instead of overloading the speed
    fields.

  - The C++ client test suite is becoming a bit outdated.  If you find it
    useful, please add code to make it better, especially driver-specific
    tests of ioctl()s.

  - I've added a "umass_reb.cfg" file to ./config.  It should more or less
    work for people there; feel free to modify/fix it.

  - The RWI drivers need a bit of work, including changes to support the new
    "bumper" interface.

ok, now i *really* have to finish my ICRA paper.

        brian.