Lights On¶

This primer will take you through the steps to learning how to control your CodeBot with Python. All you need is your CodeBot and a Chrome Web Browser.

Ready to get started? Open your browser to make.firialabs.com and let’s do this!

1. Turn on a User LED¶

Blinking an LED is often the first “Hello World” program for embedded devices like CodeBot. As a first step, let’s light one of the “User” LEDs in the center of the ‘bot.

Type the following into CodeSpace. Remember, you don’t have to type in the #comments.

# Very first CodeBot program - Lights ON!
from botcore import *

leds.user_num(0, True)

The code above uses the botcore module, which provides functions to control and monitor all the hardware on CodeBot. Take a look at the documentation for botcore.CB_LEDs.user_num to see how this function works.

2. A sequence of LEDs¶

Next try lighting more of the User LEDs, as shown below.

Note: to slow things down a bit, this code imports the time Python module. The function time.sleep adds a delay before each LED turns on.

from botcore import *
import time

leds.user_num(0, True)
time.sleep(1.0)
leds.user_num(1, True)
time.sleep(1.0)
leds.user_num(2, True)
time.sleep(1.0)
leds.user_num(3, True)

3. Blink an LED in an infinite loop¶

Now let’s try an infinite while loop in Python. The code that’s indented beneath while True: will repeat continuously.: Do you see how to exit the loop?

from botcore import *
import time

while True:
    leds.user_num(0, True)
    time.sleep(1.0)
    leds.user_num(0, False)
    time.sleep(1.0)

    if buttons.is_pressed(0):
        break

The exit code above uses botcore.Buttons.is_pressed to detect if BTN-0 is being pressed. If it is, The break statement breaks the code out of the loop!

Experiment with other LEDs on CodeBot…

CodeBot has many more LEDs to try. Explore botcore.CB_LEDs to find out how to use them, and do some experiments. For example:

leds.ls_num(n, is_on)   # Line Sensors 0-4
leds.prox_num(n, is_on) # Proximity Sensors 0-1

And can you guess what these do?:

leds.user([1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0])  # 8-bits of LED fun!
leds.ls([1,1,0,1,1])
leds.prox([1,1])