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Pleo is a robot hidden inside a cute little dinosaur. The robot comes from Amazon Scotland since it are not sold in Denmark yet. It was shipped by UPS and delivered in Denmark the day after it had left the shop.

Here are some pictures of the dinosaur before birth. I shall mention that you don’t doubt that the robot is new is smells like new paint.

Since the robot is from Scotland it comes with a English power connector and it doesn't fit into a standard Danish power socket so a converter is of cause needed. Its maybe also one of the causes that it isn't sold in Denmark and Germany yet.

And some of the dinosaur after power on. After the initial birth Pleo becomes active and will of cause play like a dog with a stick.

The fun part is of cause that it is possible to update the software running the robot. With new updates from UGOBE but also with your own custom software. UGOBE plans to release a PDK later this year, but there are already some third party applications available now to ease the development.

UGOBE development site.

MySkit Performance Editor for PLEO

YAPT

Pleo are a well equiped robot Pleo inside

General, Program Development

Motivation for building the application

As I mentioned in this blog post Precision Link Xceed protocol I wrote some code to upload the measurements from the device I lead me to the decision to try adding the data to the data file of the Precision Link program. I decided to take another approach. This application is a program like the Precision Link but it is constructed with a plugin structure which enables for easy extension of the program.

Description

Blood Glucose Manager is a tool build in .net 3.5 with a WPF userinterface. The main focus of the project is to build an application that can manage blood glucose readings. It is designed to use reflection which makes it easy to extend the various types of readers (The glucose measurement devices 'hardware') supported and likewise extend the application with additional views on the readings returned from the devices

The project is hosted at CodePlex.com as a open source project. link

I will extend this post later on with additional information about how to make extensions (plugins) for this application.

Program Development

I have a Precision Link Xceed device. It is a fine measurement device and it can be connect to the pc to transfer measurement to a software program to analyze the measurements.

Precision Link Xceed Device

All that is fine but there is a problem the software program is not supported on Windows Vista and i looks like it's made for windows 95. Shown below

Program specifications:

Microsoft Windows 98/2000/NT/ME/XP  
At least 50 MB free hard drive
1 serial port or USB-port (adapter required)
Download software (Precision Link Version 2.5)

Deployment of alternative solution

I tried this program on Windows Vista with a Sandberg USB to serial adaptor with a USB driver from windows update - and I was so lucky to try a BLUE SCREEN in Vista which haven't seen before. And another drawback in the program is that the serial ports are not detected they are hard coded so my USB adaptor on port COM 10 could not directly be used :-(

I then decided that it must be possible to upload the measurements from the device my self. I searched the Internet but could not find any documentation on the protocol used with the device. I then took my old pc and installed a serial watcher program so I could see all the traffic witch occurred between the program and the device.

After some testing and analyzing I came up with a little code in C# witch can connect to the device and return all the readings in the device.

Here is a link to a project witch includes the code.

Some specifications on the communication:

• Port settings
  • BAUD_RATE = 9600
  • DATA_BITS = 8
  • STOP_BITS = One
  • PARITY = Parity.None
  • DtrEnable = true
  • RtsEnable = true
• Commands
  • "1ID"
  • "1GET_METER"
  • "1GET_EVENTS"

Program Development