Robots often work better when you mod them w/ available cheap sensors such as IMUs, digital compasses, and range sensors (such as ultrasonic). However, when working with available cheap sensor packages you can buy online, sometimes the APIs aren’t well documented or even nonexistent. Sometimes you have to write the sensor polling code from scratch in C from design docs. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have python code that could automate popular cheap sensors and just give you sensor readings?
I am releasing code for several popular sensors here. All code is implemented in underlying C, compiled as a shared library, and then c-types is used to load the shared library into nice and friendly high-level Python. I think most users will choose to use the Python but you can also use the underlying C if you want. Code is available for using the following products:
- CHIMU AHRS (http://www.ryanmechatronics.com/ProductDetailCHIMU.htm)
- Ocean Compass (http://www.ocean-server.com/compass.html)
- SuperSonic from GoBotics (http://gobotics.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=54)
Download code here. Enjoy automating your robots in python and skip the lower level stuff!
Dr. Prateek Tandon 