Index

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

API Reference

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.

For example:

go build examples/bb8.go
sudo ./bb8 BB-1247

Windows

Hopefully coming soon…

Drivers

There is only one driver for the Sphero BB-8.