blog/content/posts/building-the-meowzor/index.md

+++
date = "2023-04-20"
draft = true
path = "/blog/building-the-meowzor"
tags = []
title = "Building the Meowzor robot"
+++

As part of the third year design studio class for Computer Engineering at UBC,
I worked on a group project using a FPGA, electronics, and other pieces. We had
to pick a project idea and then build it in a 4 month term as a group of 3 or 4
(we were 3). The group I was in built a robot called Meowzor that points a
laser in front of a cat, using an object detection model (MediaPipe) to find
where the cat is and commanding the laser robot accordingly.

<aside>
I am unsure if it is a good idea to make a cat-laser robot that encourages
using it unsupervised, since it could conceivably point the laser at the cat
for a prolonged period of time, potentially causing eye damage.

This was built as a school project and never put anywhere near an actual cat.
Maybe don't build this for real.
</aside>

You can see our presentation video here:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JyZmC07ff0Q" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="clipboard-write; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This is the robot itself:

{% image(name="meowzor-board.jpg", colocated=true) %}
Piece of plywood with a DE1-SoC development board on it next to a breadboard
with stepper drivers and a 3d printed assembly with a rotation/pitch stage.
{% end %}

The piece I built was all the robotics parts: the boundary is at the API layer
between the robot and the cat-detection service, accepting move-to commands
over HTTP. This meant that I wore a lot of hats, from Rust and embedded Linux
to FPGA dev, electronics and mechanical engineering. It also meant that I had
to make decisions to avoid as much hard complexity as possible in order to ship
a big pile of stuff on time.

This is the architecture diagram of the hardware components I worked on:

{% image(name="hw-arch-diagram.svg", colocated=true, process=false) %}
Architecture diagram of the hardware. First commands come in via protobuf HTTP
API, then they're processed by the meowzor-control daemon, which is attached to
a Nios II microcontroller with shared memory and a mailbox. The Nios has a PIO
connected to the stepper drivers.
{% end %}

We use stepper motors because they are precise, pretty fast, cheap, and easy to
integrate with.

The overall design is that `meowzor-control` receives position requests,
generates step schedules, then gives them to the Nios II firmware to execute.

## Hardware

### Mechanical parts

The robot consists of a two axis motion stage providing both pitch and rotation
movement, with the rotation motor attached to a trunnion. This overall design was
chosen because it makes it possible to easily support both sides with bearings
and ensures that we definitely have enough motor torque. I built the frame out
of three pieces to get optimal print orientation on the bearing pockets, and
joined the pieces with dovetails.

{% image(name="mech-view.jpg", colocated=true) %}
View of the mechanism from the front, showing the two gears and the motor
placement.
{% end %}

The trunnion was designed so that the axis of rotation of the trunnion runs
through the middle of the motor shaft such the laser rotation has reasonable
kinematics. The laser is mounted to the rotation motor with a coupling that has
two retention screws and one screw to actuate its power switch. Ideally it
would be directly on top of the motor shaft but that's not feasible with the
long-shafted motors we had.

One cute trick used in the design of the printed parts is to force bridging by
cutting an area out of an overhanging region with a hole in it, turning it into
two bridgeable regions, which are printed as bridges. Then, on the next layer,
the cut out area is bridged in a perpendicular direction, and the hole comes
out nicely.

{% image(name="bridging-trick.png", colocated=true) %}
Screenshot of CAD showing a recessed section with a hole in the middle. There
is a strip of material chopped out of the round recessed section, one layer
thick, across the hole, constructing two bridged sections next to the hole.
{% end %}

{% image(name="slicer-bridging.png", colocated=true) %}
Screenshot of the slicer showing the top of the recessed section being bridged,
with a rectangular hole in the middle, which will print perfectly with no
supports.
{% end %}

I found various design errata in the parts I printed, mostly wrong tolerances,
but they were all patched up with some combination of kapton tape, scrap paper,
and a drill. I tried to follow the process of fixing the thing until I learn
everything I need to to do the next revision, but it turned out that one was
good enough to just continue with.

I designed the mechanical parts in Onshape and printed them in PLA on the Prusa
i3 MK3.

{% image(name="onshape-screenshot.png", colocated=true) %}
The view of the parts of the robot in Onshape. The robot consists of a U-shaped
frame that is dovetailed together, with a U-shaped able to rotate in the middle
to change its pitch. On the trunnion there's a motor mounted that provides the
rotation of the laser.
{% end %}

### Electronics

The robot uses TMC2209 stepper driver boards. We had one fail, which may have
happened due to motion with the power off, us forgetting decoupling capacitors
on the motor power rail (oops! kinda important; these were put in later) or
gremlins.

The intended decoupling design of the TMC2209 is to have at least 50μF of bulk
decoupling and a ceramic capacitor on each motor power pin. I used a 200μF
capacitor on the motor power line.

We used the GPIO pins of the DE1-SoC board, which are only documented properly
in the schematic. They are 3.3v standard so work seamlessly with the stepper
drivers. This is the pinout of that header, extracted from the schematic:

{% image(name="stepper-header-wiring.svg", colocated=true, process=false) %}
Piece cut out of the DE1-SoC schematic showing the power pins and the pins
marked as step/direction pins for the two stepper drivers.
{% end %}

### Computers

In my program we use a DE1-SoC Intel Cyclone V FPGA development board for
pretty much everything, and everyone has one. This board has these relevant
features:

* ARM Cortex-A9 dual core hard processor
* 1GB DDR3 memory
* More Cyclone V FPGA than you need
* Ethernet
* GPIOs attached to the FPGA fabric

My goal was to make the hardware and firmware as simple as possible because
they suck to work on, with the most basic FPGA system taking 6 minutes to
synthesize with Intel Quartus. The less time I am waiting for a compiler, the
more sane I will be. Firmware sucks slightly less to work on, but is also a
[wreck of a mess][quartus-bad] due to Intel tools, and the Nios II only can run
C/C++ due to the LLVM port being dead.

RISC-V would be viable if it weren't for the requirement to integrate nicely
with the Intel tools. It looks like there's [some movement on making this
work][riscv-demos], but I didn't want to take the risk on it. Intel itself has
[made a RISC-V Nios processor][nios-v], but I was under the (apparently false?)
impression that it was not available except in Quartus Pro licenses which we
don't have.

[riscv-demos]: https://github.com/ARIES-Embedded/riscv-on-max10
[nios-v]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpga/nios-processor/v.html

[quartus-bad]: https://jade.fyi/blog/quartus-elf2hex-and-misery/

Thus, what I did with the hardware is to try to shove everything nontrivial
up-stack as much as possible. I used a Nios II soft core on the FPGA fabric to
generate step signals, since it is easy to integrate with Quartus Platform
Designer (Qsys) and thereby spend less energy on hardware. Platform Designer
deals with all the annoying pieces of putting together a computer system such
as address decoding and other kinds of wiring things up.

{% image(name="qsys.png", colocated=true) %}
The main view of Platform Designer, listing components and showing connections
between them, as well as memory mappings. There are two general groups of
things: the hard processor and the soft core, which have distinct memory maps.
The hard processor is attached to the shared memory and a mailbox component,
and the soft core is attached to its own private memory, the shared memory, the
mailbox, a timer, and a programmable IO block.
{% end %}

In the end basically all of the hardware is just the reference design from the
DE1-SoC materials and various integration in Platform Designer, which is a win
because I mostly didn't have to debug it.

The final code on the FPGA fabric is a Nios II processor with a timer, a
mailbox to the hard processor, shared memory with the hard processor, and
a GPIO controller connected to some FPGA I/O pins.

## Firmware

A mailbox in hardware is an inter-processor communication primitive: it takes a
memory address and a command from the sending processor and interrupts the receiving processor when
something new is received. The receiving processor can then take the address
out of the mailbox, copy the memory out, then empty it for the next item.
Optionally the sending processor may be interrupted to inform it of it being
empty.

In the case of the Intel IP, the mailbox has a capacity of one item, and the
interrupt to the receiving processor doesn't work, at least in my version of
Quartus, so I just polled it (I may have screwed it up but I had bigger fish to
fry than to spend more time debugging it; I have 100MHz to work with, so it
does not matter one bit).

Mailboxes require that the receiving processor be able to read some kind of
memory in common with the sending processor, since they only send one pointer.
In this case I implemented it as shared memory, since I didn't want to write a
Linux driver to deal with finding the physical pages I wanted to receive from
or something like that.

The firmware for the Nios II accepts structures like this in shared memory when
signaled by the mailbox:

```c
typedef struct {
    CmdKind kind;
    Direction directions[N_MOTORS];
    uint16_t _pad;
    uint32_t delays[N_DELAYS];
} Cmd;
```

The delays are sent interleaved, with the motor ID in the top bit of them. As
soon as the mailbox receives a `Cmd`, the main thread copies it into a
(ring-buffer-based) queue in private memory and empties the mailbox. A timer
ISR checks the queue and looks at the top item. If the item is done, it
dequeues it. If not, it gets the next step in it, sets the direction, emits a
step pulse, then sets the timer to the time of the next step.

It is also possible to do something like Klipper does with its communication
protocol where it sends step times and some amount that's added to the time
after each step. I actually tried porting the code for this directly from
Klipper into Rust but couldn't get it to work so I scrapped it and did the
simpler thing given that we have *way* better bandwidth between the control
system and the microcontroller compared to Klipper given they both have direct
access to shared memory and the microcontroller is fast.

The main reason that the design looks at all like this, with the motion
planning all running on the Linux system, is because the Nios II does not run
Rust and the development workflow for more deeply embedded systems is no fun.

## Software

### `meowzor-control`

Most of the interesting code in the system is in `meowzor-control`, the daemon
that runs on Linux on the hard processor. This daemon is the interface point
with the cat-finding service, and accepts protobuf commands like this over http:

```proto
syntax = "proto3";
package meowzor;

// Move the laser to the specified angles.
message MoveTo {
    // Rotation position (radians; 0 is center)
    float rotation = 1;
    // Pitch position (radians; 0 is horizontal, positive pitches downward)
    float pitch = 2;
}

message MoveToResp {
    bool ok = 1;
}
```

Then, the moves are converted to steps with the
[`stepgen`](https://crates.io/crate/stepgen) crate, which was vendored to add
the ability to set the step position to zero (in order to be able to generate
new moves with an existing Stepgen without having to reinitialize it), and
packed into the structures used by the firmware.

Sending the structures to the firmware is accomplished with horrible villainy:

```rust
let fd = nix::fcntl::open("/dev/mem", OFlag::O_RDWR | OFlag::O_SYNC, Mode::empty())?;
let mapping_lw_axi = nix::sys::mman::mmap(
    None,
    LW_AXI_RANGE.try_into().unwrap(),
    ProtFlags::PROT_READ | ProtFlags::PROT_WRITE,
    MapFlags::MAP_SHARED,
    fd,
    LW_AXI_BASE as i32,
)?;

let mapping_axi = nix::sys::mman::mmap(
    None,
    AXI_RANGE.try_into().unwrap(),
    ProtFlags::PROT_READ | ProtFlags::PROT_WRITE,
    MapFlags::MAP_SHARED,
    fd,
    AXI_BASE as i32,
)?;
```

Then, you can access anything over the FPGA bridge by offsetting from the
pointer returned by the mmap call by the address within the range and
performing a memory write. Drivers? We don't need no stinkin' drivers where
we're going.

Note that if you wanted to write a driver, the [UIO Linux
subsystem][linux-uio] would probably be the easiest option.

[linux-uio]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/driver-api/uio-howto.html

The mailbox is operated like so, where `is_full` reads the control register and
checks the full bit, `write_ptr` writes the pointer register, and `write_cmd`
writes the command register (and signals to the receiving side of the mailbox):

```rust
while self.is_full() {
    std::thread::sleep(Duration::from_micros(10));
}

// for now just put it at zero in shared memory
std::ptr::copy(&data, self.shared_mem_addr as *mut Cmd, 1);
std::sync::atomic::fence(Ordering::Release);
self.write_ptr(0);
self.write_cmd(command_id);
```

I used [Crane](https://github.com/ipetkov/crane) because it has good
cross-compilation support and really just works, as well as having a
two-derivation model meaning that my dependencies are helpfully built only
once.

#### Verifying correctness using gnuplot

Late in the project cycle, we ran into some strange issues with the robot
misbehaving, seemingly locking up for a while, which is definitely an
integration bug of some kind, and I thought was a bug in `meowzor-control`. I
wanted to validate for myself whether it was behaving plausibly without having
hardware on hand. How do you validate that step signals are sent and that
position is correctly maintained? There's a lot of them, and looking at them in
textual format isn't going to do much good.

The solution I devised was to use a graph: make fake stepper motors in software
and report all the motions that they perform, then plot the whole lot against
to time. The fake stepper motors accept step schedules as would be sent to the
Nios microcontroller and emit log events for each step time in the schedule. I
also changed the move-to command to log when it is received to the same log to
compare it.

My hope was to find a bug where the steppers misplaced some steps over time or
something of the sort, but that was not the case.

{% image(name="plot.png", colocated=true) %}
Plot of position versus time with four series: the commanded positions of pitch
and rotation as well as the actual positions sent to the virtual steppers. The
commands shortly lead the motions, and the motions are a parabolic shape as
expected given the use of acceleration, arriving at the commanded position a
little later.
{% end %}

This plot shows how the control software would move the steppers for commands
sent by the cat-finder, along with the positions it is sent. The motion is in a
parabolic shape due to the use of acceleration control, as expected. The
steppers always arrive at the commanded positions, so whatever was observed on
the bench was some kind of electronics problem or strange problem in the
cat-finder.

I found one of each, one electronics problem of absent decoupling capacitors
(possibly also just the DRV8825 being a rubbish IC design, which I replaced
with a TMC2209 as soon as I got a spare), and one bug in the cat-finder where
it was sending NaNs, which probably were not doing anything good to
`meowzor-control`, and I learned my lesson to always check for NaN at system
boundaries and report a better error to ease debugging.

The log of step times I'm plotting has the following format for which I wrote a
simple writer in `meowzor-control`. The fields that may be missing if the event
should not generate a point on that series will have `?` filled in:

```
1:TIMESTAMP 2:PITCH/? 3:ROT/? 4:AXIS/? 5:DIR/? 6:ROT_POS/? 7:PITCH_POS/?
```

Here's some sample data used in this plot:

```
95.81459	?	?	0	0	-0.0019634955	0
95.81822	?	?	0	0	-0.003926991	0
95.82104	?	?	0	0	-0.0058904863	0
95.82343	?	?	0	0	-0.007853982	0
95.82554	?	?	0	0	-0.009817477	0
```

To take this data file and make a plot I used [gnuplot], a command-line driven
plotting program. I invoked it with `echo -e 'log.gnuplot\nlog.txt' | entr -r
gnuplot log.gnuplot` to automatically refresh when either the script or data
changed, and used an image editor (`feh`) with auto-refresh. The script I used
is this:

[gnuplot]: http://www.gnuplot.info/

```
set datafile separator '\t'
set terminal pngcairo size 1400,1000
set output "log.png"
set ylabel "Commanded pos (radians)"
plot 'log.txt' using 1:2 title "Pitch" linetype rgb "#d68a2a" pointtype 1 pointsize 5, \
    "" using 1:3 title "Rotation" linetype rgb "#4c00d4" pointtype 2 pointsize 5, \
    "" using 1:6 title "Rot pos" linetype rgb "#990ceb", \
    "" using 1:7 title "Pitch pos" linetype rgb "#f5d22c"
exit
```

Let's break down a line:

```
"" using 1:3 title "Rotation" linetype rgb "#4c00d4" pointtype 2 pointsize 5, \
^^       ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
|         |  |                 \- yellow line colour |           \-  pixel size of points
|         |  \- data series title                    \- plus-sign shaped points
|         \- x values in column 1, y values in column 2
\- use same file as last series
```

Plotting is an extremely valuable technique which I should definitely use more
while debugging, especially given how easy it is to make files full of numbers
to put into gnuplot. Any system involving numbers or time really benefits from
drawing some kind of picture while debugging it. It took about two hours to
conceive and write the mock system and get a final plot out of it which was
absolutely worth it for the unambiguous answer to "how is the system
performing": seems well behaved.

### NixOS port

The port is [available here](https://github.com/lf-/de1-soc-nixos).

Well, this is sure burying a lede. I ported NixOS to the board and it was a
*really really good idea* and saved me a load of time. Things that I gained by
porting NixOS included:

1. One-command deploys of *everything* including system configurations and new
   `meowzor-control` versions (and the building of such)
2. One-command SD image generation
3. Ability to patch things and have definitely-reproducible builds
4. Easy to hack up the operating system to make it smaller

It took about a week of work on and off. The motivation for the NixOS port was
that the board vendor had last released a port of Ubuntu 18.04 and I would
literally rather port a new OS than deal with old OS versions and lack of
config management and inability to fix the image.

Then, there was no question of which OS I wanted to port: I wanted something I
could rip everything out of easily and patch anything arbitrarily if needed.
Theoretically I could have used Yocto but I looked at it briefly and it looked
kinda like Nix But With Extra Ways To Have Incremental Build Mistakes, and more
importantly I didn't want to learn it.

I read through the [Cyclone V GSRD][gsrd] (Golden Software Reference Design),
which is an Intel port of Yocto to another board based on the Cyclone V, which
should be very close to what I needed.

[gsrd]: https://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/CycloneVSoCGSRD

The main part about a port to a new board is getting the thing to boot. Once
it's booted you're basically home free.

#### Background: Cyclone V SoC boot process

The Cyclone V SoC can boot in several different ways depending on how the
`BSEL` pins are configured. This is broken out to an unpopulated DIP switch on
the bottom of the DE1-SoC board, and the configured state is to boot off of an
SD card.

When reset is deasserted, a boot ROM on the hard processor performs early
hardware initialization, bringing up the CPU, and chain loading from some
storage, in this case, a partition of a specific MBR type on the SD card.

See the [Cyclone V Hard Processor System Technical Reference Manual][hps-trm],
appendix A, for more details on the early boot process.

[hps-trm]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/683126/21-2/hard-processor-system-technical-reference.html

This partition contains the U-Boot SPL (second phase loader), which brings up
the DDR3 main memory, serial port, and some other hardware, before chain
loading into U-Boot itself.

The FPGA fabric configuration port is accessed in various ways depending on
how the `MSEL` mode selection pins are set. On the DE1-SoC board, they are
exposed as a DIP switch set on the bottom of the board. Note that surprisingly,
`MSEL[3:0] = 4'b0000`, which you want, means *all the switches set to
ON*. This setting corresponds to FPPx16 with no encryption (fast parallel
programming), which is what works with U-Boot.

From U-Boot, the FPGA configuration image may be loaded into the
configuration port. This can also be done through Linux at runtime using the
[FPGA Region][fpga-region-dt] device tree entry.

[fpga-region-dt]: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/fpga/fpga-region.txt

U-Boot will then chain load Linux, which NixOS supports well, so the boot
process is very standard from there.

To get U-Boot to do so automatically, you need a snippet like the one below in
your U-Boot Kconfig file. This will load a script if present, then enable the
FPGA bridge, and boot Linux through the standard `extlinux.conf` mechanism.

```
CONFIG_USE_BOOTCOMMAND=y
CONFIG_BOOTCOMMAND="if ext4load mmc 0:2 ${scriptaddr} /boot/u-boot.scr; then source ${scriptaddr}; fi; bridge enable; run distro_bootcmd"
```

#### The port

The first order of business was to get a kernel that worked. I looked at the
GSRD, found the config I was supposed to use, then manually built a new kernel
with the checkout of the kernel sources.

I then put that kernel into the minimal image from the board vendor and
confirmed it booted. Success! Next, to build it with Nix.

Building a kernel with a custom config looks something like this in Nix ([full
version][kernel.nix]):

[kernel.nix]: https://github.com/lf-/de1-soc-nixos/blob/main/kernel.nix

```nix
{ stdenv, buildLinux, linuxKernel, ... } @ args:
let base = buildLinux { ... };
in linuxKernel.manualConfig {
  inherit stdenv;
  inherit (base) src version;
  configfile = ./socfpga_kconfig;
  allowImportFromDerivation = true;
}
```

It complained at build time about some missing options required by systemd, so
I added those manually to the Kconfig in my checkout and copied it back.

Next, U-Boot. This was not a fun time but not because of Nix. I built U-Boot
per the instructions on the GSRD guide, but using `socfpga_de1_soc_defconfig`
instead of the one for the different board. I replaced the U-Boot in the same
vendor image, and it would start, flash the transmit LED briefly, and not emit
anything over the serial port. Concerning.

After googling it a lot I wound up finding a forum thread about getting U-Boot
to work on the DE1-SoC, in which someone posted [a device tree patch][forum] to
set the clock frequency of the UART. I applied this patch to my U-Boot
development tree and, suddenly, console!! Rejoicing ensued before immediately
sending the patch upstream so this never happens to anyone else.

[forum]: https://forum.rocketboards.org/t/cyclonev-programming-fpga-from-u-boot/2230/14

At this point I knew both my U-Boot and Linux kernel worked, so it was time to
build a NixOS SD card image. This was one of the reasons I was excited to use
NixOS for this project: if an SD card fails, I can just make a new image in 30
seconds; the system image is totally disposable.

NixOS already has a [SD card image builder][sdimage-upstream] sort of
supporting U-Boot, but it does such support by leaving a gap to put U-Boot in
at the start of the disk after the fact. That wasn't quite satisfying enough
for me because setting partition types and dd'ing things is effort and also I
want to flash the image directly out of Nix.

I hacked this image builder up to [generate the correct partition
table directly][sdimage-hacked] and also copy the U-Boot SPL image into place.

[sdimage-upstream]: https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/blob/0c67f190b188ba25fc087bfae33eedcc5235a762/nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image.nix

[sdimage-hacked]: https://github.com/lf-/de1-soc-nixos/blob/aa4ee306ab5a63e2e838d4ca7d219165c9695c31/sd-image.nix#L184-L192

At this point I was pretty confident that my NixOS system was going to just
work when I booted it, since every part of the early boot was tested, so I just
had a go and it worked. For ten seconds. Until it reset itself.

I was suspicious of power issues or some horrible crime being done to the
hardware, so I removed the pieces surrounding the problematic time at boot such
as resizing the root partition. This changed nothing and eventually I noticed
it seemed to be based on *time* that the system was up. I got out a stop watch
and it was a round number. Immediately I put two and two together and realized
that Linux must not be correctly configured to pet the watchdog.

A quick comparison of the device trees used by the GSRD with the quite old ones
used by the upstream DE1-SoC port in U-Boot yielded some slightly different
watchdog configurations, so I just had a go and made them the same, added the
patch to my U-Boot Nix build, and rebuilt the image:

```patch
---
 arch/arm/dts/socfpga_cyclone5_de1_soc.dts | 4 ----
 1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm/dts/socfpga_cyclone5_de1_soc.dts b/arch/arm/dts/socfpga_cyclone5_de1_soc.dts
index b71496bfb5..1cef1c2e8a 100644
--- a/arch/arm/dts/socfpga_cyclone5_de1_soc.dts
+++ b/arch/arm/dts/socfpga_cyclone5_de1_soc.dts
@@ -78,7 +78,3 @@
 	clock-frequency = <100000000>;
 	u-boot,dm-pre-reloc;
 };
-
-&watchdog0 {
-	status = "disabled";
-};
--
```

..... and it works:


{% image(name="it-boots.png", colocated=true) %}
Screenshot of a terminal showing the NixOS 23.05 prerelease NixOS booted to the
login prompt on an armv7l-linux. Some lines above show "socfpga-dwmac" related
ethernet messages.
{% end %}

## Conclusion

That was a lot of work but I'm really proud of what we built. I unfortunately
learned way more abyssal nonsense than I bargained for about Intel tools, but
that happens every time. Having made this NixOS port is undoubtedly going to be
very useful in the future if/when I have to do more projects with this board
and makes it a greatly more useful device for other repurposing.

The `stepgen` crate is pretty great, and I would use that again. It's quite
easy to do stepper control from Rust, which is brilliant.

My main regret is as always the scheduling, but this happens a lot, and is
never helped by external deadlines.