That's right, humans can now use and play with the service script at the bottom of every service page.
So for every service, there is a (or soon to be) nice service page - which describes what the service is used for AND has a nice example script at the bottom in Python (soon to be other languages).

An example (only one I've verified) is our UltrasonicSensor service.
It's service page is here http://myrobotlab.org/service/UltrasonicSensor

And below is the script on the develop branch of pyrobotlab/servce/UltrasonicSensor.py

[[service/UltrasonicSensor.py]]

The test system will run the file and prepend this line to the service script 

virtual = True

and then the Auto-Magic Elf will endlessly test - no conflict - no confusion - no special rules
just 3 lines of code (possibly a couple more if multiple virtual Arduinos or Serial ports are needed)

...goodtimes....

btw this auto-magic elf pointed out at least 6 bugs which i have corrected now in the script ...

kwatters

7 years 3 months ago

This is excellent.  Now we just need good script examples for all of our services ;) 

I was wondering, do you think the automagic elf could auto-prepend more of the boiler plate stuff like

 

if ('virtual' in globals() and virtual):
    virtualArduino = Runtime.start("virtualArduino", "VirtualArduino")
    virtualArduino.connect(port)
 
?

and we can just use a convention for all scripts to use "COM99" or something like that for their arduino..

o/w every script needs to create the virtual arduino and connect to the symbolic port.

 

 

Ya .. usually .. more simple is better .. but sometimes its finding a sweet-spot between 

Tranparency & Ease of Use

With what you propose - your having "Ease of Use" - because the end user won't have to look at this code they potentially won't be using.  Most the time I would agree with this.  

However, its a single if condition, and always "off" for the end user, unless they turn it on.  But its a good "seed" for users without hardware.  Not only do auto-magic elves benefit from virtual hardware, but potentially "real" users can benefit greatly from virtual hardware.

So, I (in this case) prefer Transparency of potentially using virtual hardware vs hiding everything from the user.