The kids each have a Hexbug Spider.
In a fit of enthusiasm, I decided it would be a good idea to get an IR transceiver to control the spiders. Which turned out to be quite hard because lirc doesn't support the irtoy, and IR comms (at least for the Hexbug Spider) are highly timing-sensitive.
This is the result:
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a parser (using Parslet) to split up the incoming ir pulses into hexbug commands so we can reverse-engineer the protocol
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a wrapper for rubyserial serial port which does handshaking transmission otherwise the irtoy overloads, and the spider overloads, and commands get lost. And which makes the serial port a bit easier to read/write from pry.
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a high-level hexbug controller which accepts methods
forward,back,left,right. So that kids can type stuff and see things happen. -
IR command pulse trains are specified using s-expressions, which seemed like the lightest-weight? lightweightest? syntax for them.
Developed on a linux box, mildly tested on osx.
git clone https://github.com/djellemah/irtoy-hexbug-spider
$ rake pry
[1] pry(main)> cd Hexbug.new irtoy
[2] pry(#<Hexbug>):1> forward 3
# your irtoy lights will flash (you'll only see one), and your spider should now take 3 'steps' forward.
Lots, as is normal in a day-scale hobby project:
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I haven't figure out the granularity of the commands. That is, the remote will send really short commands but I can't see how to do that.
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Only talks on channel A. The channel B command tags aren't hard, just not implemented.
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parser has too much dead code.