I like tinkering around and throwing motors on things to see what I can make happen. This led me to building out some basic robots using a Raspberry Pi and various hardware I had laying around my shop. Now, when I build out a robot I often find that I am reusing code I’ve written for another project and just modifying it to suit my current needs – which is completely fine. But I soon realized I was spending more time looking for code and making changes to it then I enjoyed, so I decided I would just build out a single program to run my code through.
The code to run a motor is pretty straightforward and simple to write for the Pi – hook-up GPIO pins to a motor driver and send the voltage out. Motor turns. The code is basically the same it just changes based on what GPIO pins I’m using and the number of motors to run. So if I set up a class called motor with various parameters, I can run
To solve the issue of searching and finding old python routines I had on my pi and combining them into a new package for each robot I built, I decided I would just bundle all of the packages into one program that I can then use an XML configuration file to setup my program parameters and then execute the code. This allowed for some quick turn around time as all the information I needed to tweak was in one file instead of having to go through and locate all the required changes I would need to make in various classes and calls.
