First Run

[groundwater]

Hey @morganrallen awesome work!

I gave the library a run on the Sphero and have a few issues I would like to work out before Wed.

1. the time parameter for the .forward command does not seem to work unless I call .stop immediately after. This may or may not be the intention.
2. is it possible to have .left and .right re-orient the ball while stationary, i.e. where the blue tail-light rotates without the ball rolling forward. I think kids may need the visual feedback.
3. we may need a way to calibrate the ball in order to orient it's gird with the mazes grid. i.e. move the blue dot in a more continuous way before executing the maze script

Thanks so much for building this, I can already tell it's gonna be awesome!

[morganrallen]

I was messing around with auto-stopping and it resulted in very punchy movement. I have thought to add acceleration/deceleration ramping to smooth this out. This will probably result in lost of distance accuracy but will smooth out the movements.

I think I can provide stationary feedback by switching back to setHeading in left/right and always roll heading 0.

Lastly I will try turning stabilization off when not running a sequence, this should allow repositioning by hand, eliminating the need for a specific calibration step.

[groundwater]

This all sounds great, I'll try it out when it's ready.

I wouldn't worry too much about jerky movements; I imagine the kids will not be varying the duration of any individual forward, rather they're more likely to issue .forward multiple times, so keeping each forward unit relatively uniform is probably easier for them to understand.

[morganrallen]

I thought about dropping the time all together. I'm going to try to smooth
out the stopping as it was really jarring then possibly make the time
optional. Will have a crack at it this afternoon.

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Jacob Groundwater <notifications@github.com

wrote:

This all sounds great, I'll try it out when it's ready.

I wouldn't worry too much about jerky movements; I imagine the kids will
not be varying the duration of any individual forward, rather they're more
likely to issue .forward multiple times, so keeping each forward unit
relatively uniform is probably easier for them to understand.

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[groundwater]

I think that's a good idea. I think a great "unit-distance" would be the length of the sphero itself, so calling .forward once will move it forward one sphero-unit. It's easy enough to call .forward 50x if you really want to send it across the room, but I imagine the mazes will be relatively small in size.

[morganrallen]

That might be difficult to achieve. I'll see what I can do with some easing
functions.

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Jacob Groundwater <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

I think that's a good idea. I think a great "unit-distance" would be the
length of the sphero itself, so calling .forward once will move it
forward one sphero-unit. It's easy enough to call .forward 50x if you
really want to send it across the room, but I imagine the mazes will be
relatively small in size.

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[morganrallen]

Got two of the three looking pretty good. Instant feedback of direction by using setHeading and roll(0)*
And added easing to get better control of the speed. Currently one forward will travel about 10cm pretty consistently. Let me know what you think.

[morganrallen]

Oh, the * from roll(0) is that the API ref says after using setHeading heading 0 will be forward. This isn't always the case. I was consistently having it still 90° off.