Robots! (part 1)

Inspired by the android controlled lego robots I saw at DroidCon UK this year, and with difficulty finding a use for my raspberry pi, I’ve decided to have a go at building a robot that I can control via an android app. Having a 24 hour flight home from Australia at the weekend, I’ve had plenty of time to think about how I might approach this task (or challenge as I refer to it as I’ve no prior experience with robotics / socket programming).

My plan is to have a python socket server running on the pi. This will provide a socket that an android client can invoke commands on. This python server will also interact with the python scripts that the BrickPi uses to control lego motors.

Whilst most of my experience revolves around Java, I’ve opted for python for the following reasons

• Python is supported on the pi out of the box, no need to mess around with installing Java
• The BrickPi has support for Python (and C)
• I feel like learning something new

Baby steps…

Starting simple, I thought it best to create a simple script that listens on a socket, and then create a client that sends it some data to print out to the console. Once I have this working I can expand on it and make the client more sophisticated (an android app for example) and also enhance the server so it can handle different types of commands.

Server
There are plenty of example python scripts online, I found a good one here and tweaked it slightly to remove the parts I don’t want. (full credit to pythonadventures!)

#!/usr/bin/env python
# server.py

import socket
import select
import Queue
from threading import Thread
import sys

class ProcessThread(Thread):
    def __init__(self):
        super(ProcessThread, self).__init__()
        self.running = True
        self.q = Queue.Queue()

    def add(self, data):
        self.q.put(data)

    def stop(self):
        self.running = False

    def run(self):
        q = self.q
        while self.running:
            try:
                # block for 1 second only:
                value = q.get(block=True, timeout=1)
                process(value)
            except Queue.Empty:
                sys.stdout.write('.')
                sys.stdout.flush()
        #
        if not q.empty():
            print "Elements left in the queue:"
            while not q.empty():
                print q.get()

t = ProcessThread()
t.start()

def process(value):
    print value

def main():
    s = socket.socket()
    host = socket.gethostname()
    port = 3033
    s.bind((host, port))

    print "Server listening on port {p}...".format(p=port)

    s.listen(5)                 # Now wait for client connection.

    while True:
        try:
            client, addr = s.accept()
            ready = select.select([client,],[], [],2)
            if ready[0]:
                data = client.recv(4096)
                t.add(data)
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
            print
            print "Stopping server."
            break
        except socket.error, msg:
            print "Socket error %s" % msg
            break

    cleanup()

def cleanup():
    t.stop()
    t.join()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The socket is bound to a port, and then continually listens for incoming data. Once some data is received, it is added onto a queue, which is then sequentially executed.

Client
The client is is fairly straightforward, it involves opening a connection on a socket and writing data to it, a few lines of Java code.

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        InetAddress address = InetAddress.getLocalHost();
        Socket socket = new Socket(address, 3033);

        BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());

        OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(bos, "US-ASCII");

        System.out.println("Sending message...");

        osw.write("Hello!");
        osw.flush();
    }

Thats it for now, you can checkout my code on github (or just copy/paste the above) and run the client and server and see it in action.

I’ll start on the client next..