dbirman / morseapi

Unofficial API for controlling Wonder Workshop's Dot and Dash robots

MorseAPI

MorseAPI is an unofficial (and unsanctioned) python library for controlling Wonder Workshop's Dash and Dot robots.

The robots are controlled with commands sent over Bluetooth, specifically GATT. MorseAPI abstracts out this communication protocol and, through python methods exposes control of lights, motion and sensor data.

Compatibility

MorseAPI has only been tested on GNU/Linux platforms. It should work with any reasonably modern Distro. Limitation is mostly on the BlueZ version, and bluetooth adapter compatibility. Raspberry Pi is a particularly attractive platform for running MorseAPI. Its a small enough package that it can be attached to the robot making for a fully integrated, and portable package. Raspbian in particular has been tested in this combination. Note, that Raspberry does not come with a built in bluttooth module, so a USB bluetooth accessory is required.

In theory it should be possible to us MorseAPI on OSX. To do so you must use pygatt's BGAPI backend. But it does require a very special bluetooth adapter; BLED112. Again OSX has not been tested.

Motivation

There exist smartphone apps which allow remote-controlling Dash and Dot, and even "writing programs" for them. However, the programming functionality is limited to drag-and-drop style and does not allow interaction with any industry programming languages.

That doesn't need to be the case - young kids can get started with the simple drag-and-drop interface to get some exposure and instill interest, then graduate to a programming API interface in order to create more complicated and complete implementations of their creative ideas.

MorseAPI provides that programming interface, in a language that is easy to pick up even for non-engineers: Python.

Installation

This is only tested on Debian, though it should work on other Linux flavors. OSX and Windows are NOT supported.

Steps:

• first clone this repo and cd into it
• apt-get install bluez # version 5+ is required by pygatt
• git clone https://github.com/peplin/pygatt
• pip install -r requirements.pip

Completeness

Dash and Dot have many different commands. Morse implements only fraction there of:

• LED Lights:
• Ears
• Top of Head
• Neck / Eye backlight
• Individual iris LEDs
• Iris brightness
• tail light
• Motion (Dash only)
• Head pitch and Yaw
• Move back and forth
• Turn left and right
• Sound
• Playback of built in sounds
• Uploading new sounds
• Sensor feedback
• Microphone volume
• Proximity Sensing
• Head pitch / yaw
• wheel rotation
• Dash sensing of Dot
• Robot picked / bumped / toppled oved
• Sound direction
• Gyro pitch/yaw/roll
• Vertical acceleration
• Clap
• Battery state
• Robot discovery
  • feature discovery (Dash & Dot have different feature sets)

Example

Run:

examples/clock.py C0:F0:84:3C:51:FA

where C0:F0:84:3C:51:FA should be the bluetooth address of your bot

$ python
>>> from morseapi import MorseRobot
>>> bot = MorseRobot("C0:F0:84:3C:51:FA")
>>> bot.say("hi")
>>> bot.move(100)
>>> bot.turn(45)
>>> bot.ear_color("red")
>>> bot.head_yaw(10)
>>> bot.eye(255)
>>> bot.eye(100)