libnifalcon

1.0.1

Author:
kyle@nonpolynomial.com
Cross-platform driver for the novint falcon.

Software website: http://libnifalcon.nonpolynomial.com

Novint Falcon website: http://home.novint.com

Introduction

libnifalcon is a development library for the NovInt Falcon, and is an open source, crossplatform alternative to NovInt's SDK.

libnifalcon provides basic functionality to connect to the falcon and load firmware to the internal microcontroller. In addition, it comes with sample functionality made available through the firmware available in NovInt's drivers (the novint.bin file in TestUtilties and the nifalcon_test_fw files for the library source). This firmware is distributed in the firmware directory of the source distribution, and is required for the findfalcons utility to run.

Design Overview

The main design goal of libnifalcon is to make a driver that's as flexible as the hardware itself. The Novint Falcon provides many extendable features, such as firmware loading and grip switch. We tried to design libnifalcon with the same idea.

Access to the falcon consists of 4 'behaviors':

libnifalcon ships with a stable set of classes implementing all of these behaviors. Each of these behaviors can be switched out as needed under the libnifalcon::FalconDevice class, meaning that the driver can be used both for simple device access, and as well as research on new firmware, grip hardware, and kinematics system. Here's a few ideas for usages of libnifalcon outside of just getting the falcon to work on your non-windows platform:

Should You Use libnifalcon?

One thing to note if you're new to haptics: libnifalcon is simply a driver for a certain piece of haptics hardware. It is not a haptic scene graph. This means that, while we have examples for implementing collision with some simple geometry, it's not really meant for haptics research usage unless you're looking to do very specific kinematics or grip interface work with this piece of hardware. We expect that libnifalcon will more normally be implemented as part of a larger haptics framework, such as:

Hardware Information


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