Installation

Requirements

Pypot is written in python and need a python interpreter to be run. Moreover pypot has scipy and numpy for dependencies, as they are not fully written in python they need system side packages to be build, it easier to use pre-build binaries for your operating system.

Windows

The easier way is to install Anaconda a pre-packaged python distribution with lot of scientific librairies pre-compiled and a graphical installer.

After that, you can install pypot with pip in the command prompt.

GNU/Linux

You can also install Anaconda, but it’s faster to use the binaries provided by your default package manager.

On Ubuntu & Debian:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-numpy python-scipy python-matplotlib

On Fedora:

sudo yum install python-pip numpy scipy python-matplotlib

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S python2-pip python2-scipy python2-numpy python2-matplotlib

After that, you can install pypot with pip.

Mac OSX

Mac OSX (unlike GNU/Linux distributions) don’t come with a package manager, but there are a couple of popular package managers you can install, like Homebrew.

The easier way is to install Homebrew. You have to type these commands in a terminal:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

An use Homebrew to install python:

brew install python

After that, you can install pypot with pip.

Via Python Packages

The pypot package is entirely written in Python. So, the install process should be rather straightforward. You can directly install it via easy_install or pip:

pip install pypot

or:

easy_install pypot

The up to date archive can also be directly downloaded here.

If you are on a GNU/Linux operating system, you will need to execute the above commands with sudo.

From the source code

You can also install it from the source. You can clone/fork our repo directly on github.

Before you start building pypot, you need to make sure that the following packages are already installed on your computer:

Other optional packages may be installed depending on your needs:

Once it is done, you can build and install pypot with the classical:

cd pypot
sudo python setup.py install

Testing your install

You can test if the installation went well with:

python -c "import pypot"

You will also have to install the driver for the USB2serial port. There are two devices that have been tested with pypot that could be used:

  • USB2AX - this device is designed to manage TTL communication only
  • USB2Dynamixel - this device can manage both TTL and RS485 communication.

On Windows and Mac, it will be necessary to download and install a FTDI (VCP) driver to run the USB2Dynamixel, you can find it here. Linux distributions should already come with an appropriate driver. The USB2AX device should not require a driver installation under MAC or Linux, it should already exist. For Windows XP, it should automatically install the correct driver.

Note

On the side of the USB2Dynamixel there is a switch. This is used to select the bus you wish to communicate on. This means that you cannot control two different bus protocols at the same time.

On most Linux distributions you will not have the necessary permission to access the serial port. You can either run the command in sudo or better you can add yourself to the dialout or the uucp group (depending on your distribution):

sudo addgroup $USER dialout
sudo addgroup $USER uucp

At this point you should have a pypot ready to be used! In the extremely unlikely case where anything went wrong during the installation, please refer to the issue tracker.