This GPL'ed code is taken from http://cerebrate.sourceforge.net/ where it was part of the driver suite for Fernandez, an autonomous cactus that defended its territory.

Copyrights:

• Copyright (C) 2005 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland

• Copyright (C) 2005 Roland Philippsen

• various copyrights on the build system

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

This package comes with two build setups, depending on whether you want to whole shebang (use GNU Automake) or just the bare bones driver library (use Makefile.ansi).

The usual configure, make, and optional make install should do the trick.

git clone git://github.com/poftwaresatent/crbsick.git
mkdir crbsick/build
cd crbsick/build
../configure
make 

You can use Makefile.ansi to build just the pure ANSI C portions of this package. Or copy-paste adapt it for your purposes.

git clone git://github.com/poftwaresatent/crbsick.git
cd crbsick
make -f Makefile.ansi

This is a C library which is intended to be used from within other programs. It connects to a SICK LMS laser scanner via a serial port. The included programs are not exactly fancy...

When you use the full GNU Automake setup (and have a sanely recent C++ compiler), you will end up with csick console SICK Configuration Program. With the Makefile.ansi setup, all you get is the tsick console SICK Test Program (which is essentially a pared-down version of csick).

After building with the GNU Automake system, you get a little console program called csick which you can use for testing and setting some parameters of your scanner. (The setting functionality is admittedly very limited because I ran out of time back in 2005 and now I have other things on my plate.)

./csick

If you have a non-standard name of the serial device or a specific baudrate to use, pass them as arguments. For example, to use 9600 baud on /dev/tts/17, you would say:

./csick /dev/tts/17 9600 

Similar to csick but even less functionality, you get this app when you compile the package with the Makefile.ansi approach. E.g.

./tsick /dev/tts/17 9600 

Include the sick.h header file in your program, and link it with the libsick library.

The sick_poster.h header file allows you to spawn an acquisition thread that continuously reads scans into a "poster" (a term borrowed from GenoM) and then copy the data into your own thread for processing.

So, your usual code would look something like the following examples, but please make sure to use the return values for error detection:

Let's assume you're writing in C++:

int fd(serial_open(comport, baudrate));
struct sick_poster_s * sp(sick_poster_new(fd, 1000, stderr));
sick_poster_start(sp);
struct sick_scan_s scan;
sick_poster_getscan(sp, & scan);
for(int i(0); i < 361; ++i)
  cout << " " << i << "\t" << scan.rho[i] << "\n";
sick_poster_stop(sp);
sick_poster_delete(sp);
serial_close(fd);

(But of course you are diligent enough to actually check the return values, right?)

For instance when writing ANSI C without pthreads, you only include sick.h' instead of sick_poster.h':

const char * comport;
unsigned long baudrate;
int fd;
int result;
uint16_t scan[361];
comport = "/dev/tts/0";
baudrate = 38400L;
fd = serial_open(comport, baudrate);
sick_dumpstatus(fd, stdout);
result = sick_rscan(fd, scan, dbg);
if(0 == result){
  int i;
  for(i = 0; i < 361; ++i){
    printf("  %d\t%u\n", i, scan[i]);
  }
}    

(Again, in real apps, you should check for all return values.)