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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

go get -d -u gobot.io/x/gobot/...

How to Use

package main

import (
	"os"
	"time"

	"gobot.io/x/gobot"
	"gobot.io/x/gobot/platforms/ble"
	"gobot.io/x/gobot/platforms/sphero/bb8"
)

func main() {
	bleAdaptor := ble.NewClientAdaptor(os.Args[1])
	bb8 := bb8.NewDriver(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,
	)

	robot.Start()
}

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.