blog/data/2010-09-01-spykee.txt

   1 Title: My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
   2 Tags: english, nuug, robot
   3 Date: 2010-09-01 21:00
   4
   5 <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
   6 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
   7 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
   8 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
   9 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
  10 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
  11 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
  12 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
  13 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
  14 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
  15 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
  16 drive around.</p>
  17
  18 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
  19 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
  20
  21 <p><pre>
  22 use Spykee;
  23 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
  24 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
  25 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
  26 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
  27 $spykee->left();
  28 sleep 2;
  29 $spykee->right();
  30 sleep 2;
  31 $spykee->forward();
  32 sleep 2;
  33 $spykee->back();
  34 sleep 2;
  35 $spykee->stop();
  36 </pre></p>
  37
  38 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
  39 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
  40 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
  41 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
  42 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
  43 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
  44 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
  45 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
  46 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
  47 going. :).</p>
  48
  49 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
  50 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
  51 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
  52 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>