SBrick Drive

What is it?

This library provides a simple way to control SBrick bluetooth controller for Lego in NodeJS. It focuses on controlling vehicle that can move in four directions: forward, backward, left and right.

How to play?

Installation

npm install sbrick-drive

Controlling SBrick

SBrick Drive is designed to handle instruction for four directional movements: forward, backward, left and right using the four control channels on a SBrick: 0, 1, 2 and 3. SBrickDrive needs to know which channels are used for forward and backward instruction (DRIVE_CHANNELS) and which channels are used for left and right steering (STEERING_CHANNEL). E.g. My 4X4 Crawler uses channel 0 and 1 for driving forward and backward, and channel 2 for steering.

const DRIVE_CHANNELS = [0, 1],
  STEERING_CHANNELS = [2],
  SBrickDrive = require('sbrick-drive');

const sbDrive = new SBrickDrive(DRIVE_CHANNELS, STEERING_CHANNELS);
const onConnected = function() {
  sbDrive.simpleForward();
};
sbDrive.connect(onConnected);

Clients

Three simple UIs have been created to control a SBrick-equipped vehicle using this project.

1. Drive by Keyboard npm run drive-by-keyboard Drives a SBrick-equipped vehicle with arrow keys on keyboard of a computer.

2. Drive by Script npm run drive-by-script Drives a SBrick-equipped vehicle with instructions written in a text file, one instruction per line (my daughter loved practicing typing with this). A sample instruction file can be found at src/clients/script/instructions.txt.

3. Drive by REST npm run drive-by-rest Drives a SBrick-equipped vehicle with RESTful client. This task starts a Express server that provides the following RESTful API:

   • GET /drive/forward
   • GET /drive/backward
   • GET /drive/left
   • GET /drive/right
   • GET /resolveActionFromText/:command Use DialogFlow to convert free text/speech command into one of the directional command for SBrick.

   A simple web interface was created in src/clients/rest/web/index.html, which uses HTML5 speech recognition for the four directional commands (my daughter loved this too).

License

ISC

Feedback

Drop me a line at [email protected]