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 REPL – a powerful tool in Johnny-Five


Debugging our LED can be tricky. Without rewiring things, how can we tell if our green and blue channels are flipped, or if the red is far brighter than the other channels? One tool that is very helpful for debugging Johnny-Five projects is the Read–Eval–Print Loop (REPL).

How does the REPL work?

If you have worked with Node.js, Python, or a few other interpreted languages in the past, the REPL may not be new to you. It allows you to write statements into the CLI at runtime to generate results straight from the language engine. This can be very helpful when debugging code, as you can get a glimpse into and modify the state of code at runtime. This is also true in Johnny-Five: the REPL allows us to insert Johnny-Five objects, so we can look at manipulating them at runtime. We're going to use this to play with our RGB LED and control it from the command line.

 

Adding our RGB LED to the REPL

Take a look at the Johnny-Five documentation for the REPL; it...