This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few
days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had
positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
drive around.
The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:
use Spykee;
Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
my $spykee = Spykee->new();
$spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
$spykee->left();
sleep 2;
$spykee->right();
sleep 2;
$spykee->forward();
sleep 2;
$spykee->back();
sleep 2;
$spykee->stop();
Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of
the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I
want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
going. :).
Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
where to make it available first. I will add a link to
the NUUG wiki for
those that want to check back later to find it.
