Node Rover is a group final project from Makers Academy. The original task was to build some form of robot that could be controlled wirelessely. Our team decided to make a robot based on the Mars rover (4 engines with continuous tracks). We decided that we would buidl it from scratch, and control it via a Node.js server. The goal was to have a mobile first web app which could control several aspects of the rover (motor movement, claw, camera pan tilt bracket) over wifi.

• Node.js
• C
• Mocha
• Zombie
• MongoDB
• Mongoose
• Twit
• WiFlyHQ
• Arduino (microcontroller)
• Johnny-Five
• jQuery
• JavaScript

Node.js, JavaScript and Mocha were all somewhat familar to the team members. The true challenges were with the hardware (electronic wiring and related hardware knowledge), as well as programming directly to the Arduino with C. We had to take a ground up approach to physically configuring the rover, starting with simple lighting of LED lights via usb, and progressing to wireless single character commands over telnet. Eventually we had a fully fledged wifi rover that was controllable via a desktop browser, smartphone, smartphone gyrometer, and even with Twitter commands.

• Refactor the code. Can definitely remove a lot of duplication.
• Fix bugs - mainly the occasional server crash due to lack of TCP connection error handling.
• Add an IP camera in order to use the video stream code that was incorporated.
• Write code the the built in engine Encoders on the rover (for precision control).

Andrew Snead - (http://www.github.com/snozza) Hadi Chalabi - (http://www.github.com/Schlap) Zeeshan Rasool - (http://www.github.com/zrasool88) Colin S - (http://www.github.com/mala23) Andrew Harrison - (http://www.github.com/AndrewHarrison)

The live version of the site will be launched shortly.

Clone the repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:snozza/project-noderover.git

Change into the directory and npm install the modules:

$ cd project-noderover
$ npm install

Run the tests:

$ mocha

Start the node server and visit http://localhost:3000/

$ node server.js

Please note that the app is written for the Arduino Uno combined with a RN-XV Wifly Module, Wireless SD Shield, and a 4 motor controller shield. The code will likely need to be modified to accomodate other products.

You will also need to sign up for a Twitter Dev account in order to use the Twitter control functionality. Add a file called config.js to the root of /node_modules/twit and add it to your .gitignore file. Then add the following (replaced with your details):

module.exports = {
  consumer_key: '...'
  , consumer_secret: '...'
  , access_token: '...'
  , access_token_secret: '...'
}