We're connecting a Sphero robot to the AWS IoT Cloud via a Raspberry Pi!
The aim of the day is to learn new things. You do not need to achieve specific goals. The agenda of the day caters for varying levels of experience and different people will learn different things by playing with the same tools.
Before you attend the Make Day, there are a couple of basics you should have under your belt. Makers that arrive well prepared get the most out of their Make Days.
We've compiled an introduction to the technologies you'll be playing with, as well as some activities you can run through. If you get stuck on any of these, please shout in Make Slack.
- Get inspired by previous Makers
- Check the agenda and location
- Say hi on Slack
- Read this doc and do the prep activites
A Raspberry Pi is simply a very small and cheap computer that runs Linux. There are some amazing Pi projects out there, and for this course we're going to be using the Pi as the mechanism for connecting our Sphero to the IoT Cloud. We'll be using the Pi 3 for this course, so have a look at its specs if you're curious.
The OS we'll be using is Raspbian, which is a Debian-based Linux distro that is highly optimized for the Raspberry Pi's ARM CPUs. If you are unfamiliar with the Linux command line then watch this video.
If you knew the state of every thing in the world, and could reason on top of the data: What problems would you solve?
IoT simply means that devices are connected to the internet and are sending and receiving data or instructions to and from an IoT platform. AWS provides several services for managing IoT devices. We'll be using the AWS IoT Core service for connecting and managing our Spheros. If you are completely new to IoT, then watch this fantastic introduction to AWS IoT to get a better idea.
-
Prep Activity: PubSub via AWS Dashboard.
-
Prep Activity: Watch the video and learn how to add a device to the IoT Cloud. Then create a certificate and policy, and register a thing.
-
Prep Activity: Use your newfound PubSub knowledge to solve a PubSub riddle with Javascript :).
The robot we'll be using is the Sphero Sprk+. Sphero is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device that can move around and change colour. It has a top speed of 2 meters per second (!) and you'd be surprised to see how much it can do.
You're going to be controlling Sphero programmatically - first locally with a Raspberry Pi, and then via the AWS IoT Service. We'll be using the official Sphero Javascript SDK. We've also created a CLI tool for you to use on the Make Day. Since you (probably) don't have a Sphero at home, we've created a small Javascript project that will get you familiar with Sphero's basic commands.
- Prep Activity: Control a virtual Sphero with JavaScript.
There is a fantastic robotics/IoT framework written in Go called Gobot. If you love Go and/or you want to challenge yourself during the day, then check out the repo and look at the Sphero Sprk+ examples. Be warned, this is not an official SDK and we've not (as yet) done extensive testing for Sphero with Gobot! Make Day is about exploring, playing and learning, so feel free to go for it if you are up for the challenge :).