In my previous post I talked about using Unix as an embedded programming "language" (as opposed to a hosting environment for embedded apps).
I started to think about where to begin. Well, let's consider the iRobot Create platform (Roomba too!).
Between your controller and the iRobot is a serial port and a binary command protocol.
If I wrote a small C app to talk over the serial port and convert to/from binary and text, I can utilize the Unix pipeline for some further down app that reads the robot's binary response as newline delimited text data.
For example:
echo "get sensors" | irobot-oi /dev/ttyS0 | some-later-app
The "irobot-oi" open "/dev/ttyS0", takes text commands as input ("get sensors"), converts it to an iRobot OI binary request, sends it, reads the binary response and converts it to text for "some-later-app". This app could be written in C, awk, perl, etc.
This approach is so obvious that I would be shocked to learn that no one has tried it. I know there are libraries available the iRobot Open Interface (OI) in python and other languages, but is there a Unix command line available?
From a traditionalist Unix position, "irobot-oi" is actually doing too much. You'd have to encode mappings between each binary command/response byte/bit and text. A more minimal approach would be to write an even simpler binary/text converter that simply understands the protocol encapsulation and accepts/emits a comma delimited representation of the binary data. (Since the OI response protocol is directly dependent on request -- there are varying length responses with no terminator -- we have to develop some smarts into the converter.)
So, instead we would have something like this:
echo "142,2,9,13" | irobot-oi-cvt /dev/ttyS0 | some-later-app
The above command requests the state of the left cliff sensor (9) and the virtual wall detector (13) and sends the result (in comma delimited text) to "some-later-app" (which may do the actual english text mapping or simply react to the numbers).
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