Book Image

Hands-On Robotics with JavaScript

By : Kassandra Perch
Book Image

Hands-On Robotics with JavaScript

By: Kassandra Perch

Overview of this book

JavaScript has an effective set of frameworks and libraries that provide support for embedded device programming and the robotics ecosystem. You’ll be able to put your JavaScript knowledge to work with this practical robotics guide. The book starts by guiding you in setting up an environment to program robots with JavaScript and Rasberry Pi 3. You will build beginner-level projects, such as a line-following robot, and then upgrade your robotics skills with a series of projects that help you get to grips with the Johnny-Five library. As you progress, you’ll learn how you can improve your projects by enabling advanced hardware components and programming concepts. You’ll even build an advanced AI-enabled robot, connect its NodeBots to the internet, create a NodeBots Swarm, and explore Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). By the end of this book, you will have enhanced your robot programming skills by building a range of simple to complex projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The terminology of the animation library


The animation library was named the way it was quite intentionally; the vocabulary of the animation object very closely matches the vocabulary of animating images. Let's look at a few of the terms we'll be using heavily throughout this chapter.

  • Frame: A frame of an animation is, in this context, the state of the servo at a given instance in time. As you can imagine, programming each and every frame of servo movement for a complex group of servos, such as a limb, would be a nightmare. Luckily, technology is on our side here, and we won't have to write each and every frame.
  • Keyframe: A keyframe is a point in an animation that serves as an anchor unless you're drawing (or programming) every frame of an animation by hand; you establish a set of keyframes that establish the major points of movement for the animation. For example, in our full sweep we were doing earlier, a good set of keyframes would be something like this:
    • Start at any degree
    • Be at 0 degrees...