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

Project – scraping data from websites with your Pi


HTML scraping is the process of making a request to a webpage in order to obtain the HTML itself, so data can be parsed out of it. We're going to build a bot that shows whether johnny-five.io is up or not by scraping https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, a site that tells you if a site is down from multiple sources.

You don't need to change the wiring setup from the weather dashboard for this project, our current hardware is all we need.

Scraping downforeveryoneorjustme.com for johnny-five.io

First, go to https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and enter johnny-five.io in the URL input, and hit Enter. You should end up at https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/johnny-five.io, where hopefully you'll see a rather simple page that looks like this:

Now to prepare for our web scraping code, we need to know what HTML element we're looking for as well as the URL. Right-click the It's just you. and select Inspect (or whichever variation it is on your browser...