The PiE robotics kit is a platform for building and operating a robot programmed in Python. Designed to give high school students hands-on engineering experience, the kit allows users to control sensors and actuators through a high-level API without deep technical expertise.
The kit consists of several components:
- Runtime, a daemon running on each robot's Raspberry Pi that executes student code and sends commands to Arduino-based sensors.
- The Smart Devices library, which implements a duplex binary messaging protocol for controlling sensors. The library also includes Arduino sketches for each particular device type as well as Python bindings.
- Dawn, an Electron app frontend that combines a text editor with a control system for operating a robot.
- Shepherd, a web app for running matches and managing the field during a competition.
Please see the documentation for a discussion of the architecture.
Here is an early look at the kit:
Runtime logging the state of a switch to Dawn:
dawn.mp4
Running a match in Shepherd: