gopigo.js

Program your GoPiGo in JavaScript.

About

The GoPiGo is a robotics platform made by Dexter Industries. It uses I2C to communicate between the Pi and a custom board (heavily inspired by the Arduino), rather than use the Pi's GPIO pins. For this reason, traditional NodeBots tools like Johnny-Five/Raspi-IO are not helpful.

Thankfully, DI has made their Python library open source and freely licensed. This package is a fairly straightforward translation of that Python library into CoffeeScript. (The syntactic similarity is striking.) For convenience, the compiled JavaScript file is also included.

The API is virtually identical, with a few minor changes noted in the source code. Note that this means the library is synchronous, which is okay considering the underlying I2C driver is synchronous too. If you have questions about a particular function, consult DI's docs or the CoffeeScript source.

The package is licensed the same as DI's: CC BY-SA 3.0.

Install

If you don't already have Node installed on your Pi, these instructions seem as good as any. Then:

npm install gopigo

It may take some time to build the dependencies. Read the next section while you're waiting.

Troubleshooting

If you get "TypeError: Failed to set address", add the following to /etc/rc.local/ above the exit command, and then execute it with sudo:

chmod o+rw /dev/i2c*

You should only attempt to npm install gopigo on the Pi itself. This will install node-i2c. Most of the steps listed in its README have already been done to your GoPiGo-ready Pi, and the one that hasn't I just mentioned above. If you have further issues with i2c, consult the node-i2c README.

Sometimes issuing multiple commands over the bus (particularly LEDs) causes intermittent failures. I've had success using setTimeout(func, 0) in these cases.

If you encounter any other problems, please open an issue or send a pull request!