Your First Skills

Are you ready to build your first skill on HEXA? This first example shows how to use the mind CLI to build, package, and run a Skill on HEXA. Then we'll talk about how to make HEXA walk and use sensors in the SensorWalkSkill tutorial.

Make sure you've installed the MIND SDK before continuing.

Create a new project

To start running Skills on our HEXA, we can use mind init projectname to build an example skeleton project. Let's do that now:

$ mind init helloworld
$ cd helloworld

Build and package

Well, our Skill doesn't really do anything right now. But that's okay. We should probably test that we can build and package it correctly, and get it sent to our HEXA robot. We'll go into how to make a walking skill in this tutorial.

$ mind build   # Will build an ARM binary into robot/skill
$ mind pack    # Will pack the Skill as an mpk file.

Run

Before we can run a Skill, we need to tell it what HEXA to run on. To see a list of available HEXAs on the network, we can run mind scan.

$ mind scan
10.0.0.51 HEXA
10.0.0.76 HEXA4XMZ

If we want to run the Skill on the HEXA named HEXA4XMZ, we can either execute mind run HEXA4XMZ or set this particular HEXA as the default robot.

Here's how we do that:

$ mind set-default-robot HEXA4XMZ
$ mind get-default-robot # Just to be sure
HEXA4XMZ
$ mind run

If you're just testing or on a friend's HEXA, you probably don't need to set the default robot. But if you're going to be developing a lot on the same robot, it can save a lot of time if you set the default.

If you can not find any robot while execute mind scan, this might be because multicast is blocked or unstable in your WLAN, try mind run --ip directly instead, like mind run --ip 10.0.0.51. You can find ip address of HEXA in HEXA APP.

Once you execute mind run, your Skill (which currently does nothing) should be running on your HEXA and displaying its status in your terminal.

Ready to get HEXA walking? Check out our SensorWalkSkill tutorial next.