Control a RaspberryPi Robot using Python and a mobile browser

Usually I use some physical buttons or joystick attached to my electronics in order to quickly test or control components like motors, relais or LEDs. I was searching for a better way, but could not really find one. In this article, I describe how I built a RESTful webserver with websockets, and a javascript-based based interface in form of a website. That way, any linux-based robot-controller can be controlled using a cellphone or a tablet. The code needed can be found here: https://github.com/TobiasWeis/robotcontrol-javascript

Interactive, low-latency javascript-based websocket-GUI for touch-devices with a python-flask backend that interfaces to robotic components. It provides virtual 2-axis joysticks (inspired by nipple.js but without the multitouch issues) and buttons that all work simulatenously. Due to the two-way websocket connection, status-messages from the robot can be displayed in the text-area.

After several iterations I arrived at below, simple architecture. The core is our flask-server (server-websocket/main.py). This both serves the website, and has endpoints for the websocket connection to this website. The robot-modules (currently controllers for actuators like stepper- and servo-motors, as well as two toggles for LEDs) are located in the ./robot folder. Each of these is a separate multiprocess and communicates with the server using multiprocess.queue.

The schematic of the used hardware is below. It consists of a RaspberryPi 3 B+, an A988 stepper driver carrier (https://www.pololu.com/product/1182), a Nema14 stepper motor, a 9G mini servo motor, a slightly bigger no-name servo (Sportline Sport Best.Nr.313-0001), and two LEDs.

TobiasWeis | 22. Juli 2018
  • Chris 22. Januar 2022 at 21:29
    Hallo Tobias, ich finde die GUI mit den beiden Joysticks genial und würde es gerne für mein Projekt abwandeln. leider kann ich die Daten nicht abgreifen. Egal was ich versuche. Könntest du mir einen Tipp geben wie ich ein einfaches global aus den Joystick-Koordinaten erzeuge? Ich nutze Flask und Python3 und habe deine main.py schon entsprechen angepasst. Grüße Chris
    • TobiasWeis 23. Januar 2022 at 13:27
      Hi Chris, ich habe dir eine E-Mail geschrieben

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