Software Users Guide

This guide explains how to use YARP and YARP tools to manage and run CINDY applications comprising a collection of components.

Setting up your machine: Running YARP

Once you have installed the CINDY software development environment you are (almost) ready to run the CINDY applications.

Before you do, you have to launch a YARP server and a YARP run server.

From the Windows 10 toolbar, launch a Command Prompt terminal and do the following.

yarp server

This launches the YARP name server.

Now, launch another Command Prompt terminal and do this.

yarp run --server /cindy1

This creates a run server named /cindy1 and is used by YARP to find out where to execute the components in the application.

If the YARP name server complains about an invalid IP address, then do

yarp server --write

and again in another terminal

yarp run --server /cindy1

This allows YARP to overwrite the YARP configuration file with the IP address of the computer. In some instances, e.g. when setting up your own network of YARP servers, you may want to define your own static IP addresses for every computer on the network which you want to use as a YARP run server. Instructions on how to do this will be provided in due course.

Using yarpmanger to manage CINDY applications

CINDY software is just as set of interconnected components and CINDY software applications are defined by identifying the components to be used, the computers (nodes) on which they are to be run, and the connections between the various components. All this is done with a .xml application file, normally stored in the app directory.

YARP provides GUI and a console/terminal tools to help you run these application. This is called yarpmanager and yarpmanager-console. These are powerful tools and you can read more about them here here. For the present, just note that yarpmanager can read a .ini configuration file to find out where the applications are (among other things).

There is a default ymanager.ini file in the root of the CINDY directory and it simply tells yarpmanager to look for all application .xml files under the release directory.

So, to finally get started, launch another (i.e. a third) Command Prompt terminal, change directory to the CINDY root directory and enter gyarpmanager

C:/CINDY>yarpmanager

On my implementation of YARP, this launches the console tool, rather than the GUI tool, so the following instructions assume you are using the console version of yarpmanager.

Once this tool has been launched, you need to open the applications you want to run. First, list the applications that are available by entering the following command.

>> list app

One of the apps is attentionGUI. Load it as follows.

>> load app attentionGUI

Now run the components as follows.

>> run 0
>> run 1
>> run 3
>> connect

You can stop the application as follows.

>> disconnect
>> stop 0
>> stop 1
>> stop 2

You can get help.

>> help

Or just exit yarpmanager.

>> exit

---

Return to The CINDY Cognitive Architecture main page.