the Embedded Systems Simulator - featuring Lunar Lander!

The following libraries must be installed with their dev packages:

• ZeroMQ
• JSONCpp
• QT4 and qmake
• Bullet Physics, at least version 2.81

In recent versions of Ubuntu, the first three can be installed with the command

$ sudo apt-get install libzmq-dev libjsoncpp-dev libqt4-opengl-dev qt4-qmake

The version of Bullet Physics available in the default repositories is too old and so the latest source of Bullet must be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/bullet/downloads/list. From the bullet_src_dir edit CMakeLists.txt to enable double precision, by changing the appropriate SET line to ON. Then, compile the source with

$ cd bullet_src_dir
$ cmake . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=on -DINSTALL_LIBS=on
$ make -j5
$ make install

The -j5 flag to make runs 5 concurrent compilation processes. In general, you should choose the number to be the number of processors you have, plus one.

The latest version of ESS can be cloned from the git repository at https://github.com/daemacles/ess with the command

$ git clone https://github.com/daemacles/ess

which will place the code in a subdirectory called ess

From the toplevel ess directory, run

$ ./build

Then you can execute the programs with the launcher scripts generated in the ess/bin directory.

If you want the libraries permenantly availble, you may copy the libesscommon.so.* and libessclient.so.* files from ess/src/esscommon and ess/src/essclient to a directory on your library search path (e.g. /usr/local/lib) and then update dynamic library cache with

$ sudo ldconfig

The physics server is located in the ess/src/server directory. It can be run with

$ bin/server.sh 1200

Where 1200 is the port the server will listen on, and is the default port for the sample client program, qlient.

Two demo clients are provided. cli_client is a command line client with a simple controller that attempts to bring the angular velocity to zero. qlient is a GUI based on QT where the rocket's engines can be manually controlled with the W A and D keys. W fires two engines to go straight whereas A and D fire a single engine each for turning. Don't forget about inertia!

qlient can be run with

$ bin/qlient.sh 1200

If there are any questions or bug reports, please contact the authors at

jay .at. cs uw edu