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Sphero BB-8

The Sphero BB-8 is a toy robot from Sphero that is controlled using Bluetooth LE. For more information, go to http://www.sphero.com/bb8

How to Install

Please refer to the main README.md

How to Use

package main

import (
  "os"
  "time"

  "gobot.io/x/gobot/v2"
  "gobot.io/x/gobot/v2/platforms/bleclient"
  "gobot.io/x/gobot/v2/drivers/ble/sphero/bb8"
)

func main() {
  bleAdaptor := bleclient.NewAdaptor(os.Args[1])
  bb8 := bb8.NewBB8Driver(bleAdaptor)

  work := func() {
    gobot.Every(1*time.Second, func() {
      r := uint8(gobot.Rand(255))
      g := uint8(gobot.Rand(255))
      b := uint8(gobot.Rand(255))
      bb8.SetRGB(r, g, b)
    })
  }

  robot := gobot.NewRobot("bb",
    []gobot.Connection{bleAdaptor},
    []gobot.Device{bb8},
    work,
  )

  err := robot.Start()
  if err != nil {
    fmt.Println(err)
  }
}

How to Connect

The Sphero BB-8 is a Bluetooth LE device.

You need to know the BLE ID of the BB-8 you want to connect to. The Gobot BLE client adaptor also lets you connect by friendly name, aka "BB-1247".

OSX

To run any of the Gobot BLE code you must use the GODEBUG=cgocheck=0 flag in order to get around some of the issues in the CGo-based implementation.

If you connect by name, then you do not need to worry about the Bluetooth LE ID. However, if you want to connect by ID, OS X uses its own Bluetooth ID system which is different from the IDs used on Linux. The code calls thru the XPC interfaces provided by OSX, so as a result does not need to run under sudo.

For example:

GODEBUG=cgocheck=0 go run examples/bb8.go BB-1247

Ubuntu

On Linux the BLE code will need to run as a root user account. The easiest way to accomplish this is probably to use go build to build your program, and then to run the requesting executable using sudo.