From: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 18:57:07 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: More on the robot.
X-Git-Url: https://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/commitdiff_plain/bdd3e9d5c068611e7d98fe77c7f1f726c02e8501?ds=sidebyside

More on the robot.
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+Title: My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
+Tags: english, nuug, robot
+Date: 2010-09-01 20:55
+
+<p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
+days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling minen 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+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();
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>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. :).</p>
+
+<p>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 
+<a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
+those that want to check back later to find it.</p>