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

Building a weather dashboard with an LCD


Now that we have our weather data, it's time to wire our character LCD to our Pi and use it to show the weather data. We'll explore the Johnny-Five LCD object, wire it to the Pi, and code it all together with Johnny-Five and the npm request module.

Adding an LCD to the Pi

Refer to the following diagram for the connection:

Note

Keep in mind that backpack with the I2C interface is on the back of the LCD; I moved it forward in the diagram to help you see the connections to the Pi.

The LCD object

Let's take a look at the LCD object in the Johnny-Five documentation in order to figure out how to construct and use our LCD in our weather dashboard code.

Constructing our LCD

Usually, an LCD without the I2C can take up to eight pins! That's a lot, and I like as few wires as possible in my robotics projects (easier to debug later). With our backpack, we only need the two power pins and two I2C pins. But that also means we'll need to find our controller—if you are using...