shoes-artoo-sphero

Playing with controlling a sphero from shoes with the help of artoo. More to come here - it's pretty simple atm =)

So far you can let the sphero roll forward/left/right/back, stop it, change the speed and change the color - all within a nice little shoes GUI :-)

Still a bit under development/fun time. This only works for Linux/OSX due to dependencies not running on Windows. Sorry.

Setting up

At first you should run bundle install in order to get all the dependencies.

Then you have to install another non ruby dependency:

artoo install socat

Connecting to the sphero

Before running this you need to connect to the sphero. This heavily relies on the artoo-sphero gem. So in order to set everything up, pair your sphero please follow the instructions from their README. The following is basically copied from their README:

OSX

The main steps are:

• Pair your computer and the Sphero
• Use a socket to serial connection to map a TCP socket to the local unix port
• Connect to the device via Artoo

First pair your computer and Sphero. You might be prompted for a passcode, but you do not need to enter it, sinec the Sphero does not check.

Once paired, use the artoo connect scan command to find out your connection info:

$ artoo connect scan

Now you are ready to connect to the Sphero using the socket, in this example port 4567:

artoo connect serial Sphero-WRW 8023

Linux (original is Ubuntu, works well for at least Debian)

The main steps are:

• Pair your computer and the Sphero
• Map your device to a unix port
• Use a socket to serial connection to map a TCP socket to the local unix port
• Connect to the device via Artoo

First pair your computer and Sphero. You might be prompted for a passcode, but you do not need to enter it, sinec the Sphero does not check.

Once paired, use the artoo connect scan command to find out your connection info:

$ artoo connect scan
Scanning ...
  00:06:66:4A:14:99 Sphero-WRW

Next, you need to bind the Sphero to the system port. In the above example, /dev/Sphero-WRW. The easiest way to do this is to use the artoo connect bind command:

artoo connect bind 00:06:66:4A:14:99 Sphero-WRW

Now you are ready to connect to the Sphero using the socket, in this example port 4567:

artoo connect serial Sphero-WRW 8023

Running the app

After you have set up and connected to the sphero you have to do the following in another terminal:

Linux:

bundle exec jruby app.rb

Mac:

bundle exec jruby -J-XstartOnFirstThread app.rb

Have fun driving around. Notice that the app does not know where exactly the front of the sphero is so thinks might get interesting :-)