libcoderbot

libcoderbot is an effort to write a fast, low-level control library for the CoderBot platform. The CoderBot is a Raspberry Pi-based programmable robot intended for educational purposes and, in its original form, exposed a REST API to the programmer for ease of use.

More informations about the CoderBot platform are available on the project's website, and technical documentation is available on the Wiki.

Features

	Python API	libcoderbot
CoderBot V4 Support	Yes	No
CoderBot V5 Support	Yes	Yes

CoderBot V5 Shield Feature Support Matrix

Feature	Bus	Support
Motor Driver (L293DD)	GPIO	Yes
Encoders	GPIO	Yes
Sonars	GPIO	No
MPU (LSM9DS1)	I2C	Planned
MCU (ATMega 328P)	SPI	Planned

An overview of the shield's hardware is available in CoderBot's Developer Docs, and schematics are open-source and available here.

Prerequisites

libcoderbot requires the following packages to be installed:

• build-essential - Provides the compiler and a minimal but functional build environment (required, dev).
• git - Provides the git revision control system (optional, dev).
• doxygen - Provides the Doxygen documentation generator (optional, dev).
• pigpio - Provides the PiGPIO library (required, runtime, dev).

To install all of the above you can use the command:

apt install pigpio git build-essential doxygen

Building

These instructions assume you're building and running the library and the examples directly on the CoderBot's Raspberry Pi, running Raspberry Pi OS.

A Makefile is provided for convenience. If you just want to build the library, you can type make from the project's root folder. You can make DEBUG=1 to compile with debugging options enabled (no optimizations, no symbol stripping).

A Doxyfile is provided and can be used for generating the documentation in HTML. To generate the documentation, you can simply invoke doxygen from the project's root folder.

Usage

libcoderbot depends on pigpio, which must be initialized before trying to use the GPIO port. You may also need to run your programs as root. The following example shows how to write a simple program that makes the robot turn on the spot:

// stop.c

#include <pigpio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#include "libcoderbot/include/cbdef.h"
#include "libcoderbot/include/motor.h"

cbMotor_t mot_l = {PIN_LEFT_FORWARD, PIN_LEFT_BACKWARD, forward};
cbMotor_t mot_r = {PIN_RIGHT_FORWARD, PIN_RIGHT_BACKWARD, forward};

void init() {
	if (gpioInitialise() < 0) exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
	cbMotorGPIOinit(&mot_l);
	cbMotorGPIOinit(&mot_r);
}

void terminate() {
	cbMotorReset(&mot_l);
	cbMotorReset(&mot_r);
	gpioTerminate();
}

int main(void) {
	init();
	atexit(terminate);
	printf("Killing the motors.\n");
	exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

In this example we assume that the library is located in a subfolder (libcoderbot/) of the current working directory. We use atexit() to execute gpioTerminate() regardless of where the program ends.

cc stop.c libcoderbot/libcoderbot.a -l pigpio -o stop

The resulting program can then be executed with:

./stop

You may need to run it as root if your user doesn't have permission to access the GPIO port.

License

libcoderbot is Copyright © 2023-25, Jacopo Maltagliati and is released under the GNU GPLv3 License. A copy of the license is provided in COPYING.

The original Python API is Copyright © 2014-2019 Roberto Previtera, Antonio Vivace, CoderBot contributors and is released under the GNU GPLv2 License. See CODERBOT_LICENSE for more informations.