Gobot 1.7 - Eyes Of The World

It has been a few months since our last release, and the new Gobot v1.7 has lots of good things onboard.

We have added support for OpenCV 3, by way of the brand new GoCV computer vision package.

Also, thanks to the wonderful humans at the Gophercon hardware hackday, we have also added support for the very aptly named GoPiGo3 robot from Dexter Industries. We also have experimental support for the Holystone HS-200 drone.

For the full changelog, here is a link to the Gobot 1.7 release:

https://github.com/hybridgroup/gobot/releases/tag/v1.7.0

Here are some highlights of what we've added for this new release.

OpenCV 3 Using GoCV

We've had support for OpenCV for quite some time, but have been stuck on older versions (2.x) from a couple of years ago, due to the challenges involved in wrapping the OpenCV C++ code in Go.

Thanks to a new project from our team called GoCV (https://gocv.io), we now can use the latest version of OpenCV 3.3. We even have it running on Linux, OS X, and Windows too!

Because of this very significant development, Gobot can make use of the very latest work in open source computer vision. Watch this space for more soon.

GoPiGo3 Robot

Thanks to the efforts of an entire team of contributors at Gophercon, especially @ulisesflynn we have support for the GoPiGo3 robot from Dexter Industries..

The GoPiGo3 is a rolling robotic platform based on the Raspberry Pi, intended for people who want to learn about robotics. In addition to the built-in motor controller, you can also connect Grove GPIO, Analog (AIO), and I2C devices very easily. You can use any of the Gobot GPIO, AIO, or I2C drivers with the GoPiGo3.

Check out this example that blinks the LEDs on the GoPiGo's built-in "eyes":

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"

    "gobot.io/x/gobot"
    "gobot.io/x/gobot/platforms/dexter/gopigo3"
    "gobot.io/x/gobot/platforms/raspi"
)

func main() {
    raspiAdaptor := raspi.NewAdaptor()
    gpg3 := gopigo3.NewDriver(raspiAdaptor)

    work := func() {
        on := uint8(0xFF)
        gobot.Every(1000*time.Millisecond, func() {
            err := gpg3.SetLED(gopigo3.LED_EYE_RIGHT, 0x00, 0x00, on)
            if err != nil {
                fmt.Println(err)
            }
            err = gpg3.SetLED(gopigo3.LED_EYE_LEFT, ^on, 0x00, 0x00)
            if err != nil {
                fmt.Println(err)
            }
            on = ^on
        })
    }

  robot := gobot.NewRobot("gopigo3eyeleds",
      []gobot.Connection{raspiAdaptor},
      []gobot.Device{gpg3},
      work,
  )

  robot.Start()
}

SPI

In order to implement the above-mentioned GoPiGo3 support, our intrepid Gophercon contributors have also added Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) support to Gobot.

SPI is a standard high-speed communication interface used for embedded devices. Making use of the fine work done by Golang expert @rakyll on defining a SPI interface for Go we are now able to connect SPI devices to the rest of the Gobot ecosystem.

The first platform supporting the SPI interface is an adaptor for the Raspberry Pi, but we will be adding all of the Linux systems that support SPIDEV.

Need to add a SPI device to your Gobot solution? Now you can! Let us know what devices you want, we're happy to help.

Holystone HS-200 Drone

The other major platform contribution to come out of Gophercon was experimental support for the Holystone HS-200 WiFi controlled drone. We did not know much about this quadcopter but thanks to the efforts of contributor @GuySirton we have been able to fly.

There's More

We have more goodness in this release, so do please checkout the changelog for the complete story.

https://github.com/hybridgroup/gobot/releases/tag/v1.7.0

Keep In Touch

Want to know about the latest Gobot news? Follow us on Twitter at @gobotio. Thank you!

Blog