Experimental robotic sailing boat daemon.

Boatd is designed to be the manager for a boat control system, granting graceful startup, telemetry, logging and a built in simulator.

There are two main components of a system written using boatd:

• the driver interfaces with the particular set of hardware in the boat.
• the behaviour performs a set of actions to make the boat do a particular task. The API available for these scripts is supposed to be declarative, with the idea that for any boat with a driver written, any behavour script will work.

boatd
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driver behaviour

boat hardware

Boatd is tested on Python 2.7 and 3.4.

$ pip install boatd

On any Debian based distribution:

$ apt-get install python-yaml
$ python setup.py install

$ dnf install PyYAML
$ python setup.py install

$ boatd --help
usage: boatd [-h] [CONFIG FILE]

Experimental robotic sailing boat daemon.

positional arguments:
  CONFIG FILE  a path to a configuration file

  optional arguments:
    -h, --help   show this help message and exit

After you have installed boat, it can be run with $ boatd.

Output will be similar to:

$ boatd
[15:43:55] loaded function heading as "heading"
[15:43:55] loaded function get_wind as "wind_direction"
[15:43:55] loaded function get_wind_speed as "wind_speed"
[15:43:55] loaded function position as "position"
[15:43:55] loaded function rudder as "rudder"
[15:43:55] loaded function sail as "sail"
[15:43:55] loaded driver from example/basic_driver.py

The original aim was this command would also run your behaviour directly after startup, but this functionality is not yet implemented (see the issue). After boatd is running, you should run your behaviour manually.

If you would like to use a different config file in a different location, pass the path as an argument to boatd. For example, $ boatd /etc/boatd/fancy-conf.yaml.

Boatd's main method of interaction is via the JSON API.

• GET

  Returns the current status and version of boatd. Example output:

  {
     "boatd": {
       "version": 1.1
     }
  }

• GET

  Returns attributes about the current state of the boat. Example output:

  {
    "active": false,
    "position": [2.343443, null],
    "heading": 2.43,
    "wind": {
      "direction": 8.42,
      "speed": 25
    }
  }

• GET

  Returns properties of the wind. Example output:

  {
    "direction": 8.42,
    "speed": 25
  }

Boatd drivers are implemented as a simple python module. When a behaviour script requires information about the current state of the boat or needs to send a command to some hardware, boatd runs one of the functions in the driver.

Drivers should implement functions decorated by the following:

• @driver.heading - Return the heading of the boat in degrees, relative to the world.
  • Returns: 0-360
• @driver.wind_position - Return the direction the wind is blowing, relative to the world.
  • Returns: 0-360
• @driver.wind_speed - Return the speed the wind is blowing in knots.
  • Returns: >= 0
• @driver.position - Return a tuple containing the current latitude and longitude of the boat, in that order.
  • Returns: (-90 - +90, -180 - +180)
• @driver.rudder - Set the boat's rudder to angle degrees relative to the boat.
  • Takes the arguments:
    • angle: Float, -90 - +90
  • Returns: True if successful
• @driver.sail - Similarly to rudder, set the sail to angle degrees relative to the boat.
  • Takes the arguments:
    • angle: Float, -90 - +90
  • Returns: True if successful

These functions can have any name, but are marked for use and registered with boatd using decorators.

Example, only implementing heading:

import boatd
driver = boatd.Driver()

@driver.heading
def get_heading():
    return some_compass.bearing()

If the behaviour script needs to run some other function in the driver, a handler can be registered using driver.handler(name)

For example:

@driver.handler('pony')
def example_handler():
    return something

This can then be used as any other function in a behaviour client.

To run tests, install nose

$ pip install nose

and run nosetests. If all the tests pass, the output should be similar to:

$ nosetests
..........................................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 53 tests in 1.064s

OK

The current test results from the head of the master branch can be found here.

Copyright (c) 2013-2015 Louis Taylor <louis@kragniz.eu>

Boatd is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

See [COPYING](COPYING) for more information.