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 ambient light sensor


To get started with our night-light project, we'll start by wiring up our TSL2561 I2C light sensor and making sure we get good data reads by having it print out to the command line.

 

Wiring up the sensor

In order to wire up our light sensor, we'll need to know which are the SDA and SCL pins of the Pi. For the Pi 3 and 3 B+, SDA is P1-P3 and SCL is P1-P5; these are also usually labelled on the cobblers as SDA and SCL. In order to get the sensor working, we'll need the power pin; this sensor is not 5V tolerant, so we'll need to use a 3.3V power pin. We can attach GND on the sensor to any ground pin.

The SDA and SCL pins on the sensor need to be connected to the SDA and SCL pins on the Pi, respectively. In the end, your light sensor should be wired up like the following diagram:

Now that we've wired up our sensor, it's time to figure out how to print that data using Johnny-Five and other Node.js modules so we can make sure it's up and running.

Writing a program to get readings...