NAME

Robotics - Robotics hardware control and abstraction

VERSION

Version 0.23

SYNOPSIS

Provides local communication to robotics hardware devices, related peripherals, or network communication to these devices. Also provides a high-level, object oriented software interface to abstract the low level robotics commands or low level robotics hardware. Environmental configuration is provided with a configuration file in YAML format. Allows other hardware device drivers to be plugged into this module.

Simple examples are provided in the examples/ directory of the distribution.

Nominclature note: The name "Robotics" is used in full, rather than "Robot", to distinguish mechanical robots from the many internet-spidering software modules or software user agents commonly (and erroneously) referred to as "robots". Robotics has motors; both the internet & software do not!

EXPORT

No exported functions

FUNCTIONS

new

Probes the local machine for connected hardware and returns the device tree.

configure

Loads configuration data into memory.

pathname of configuration file in YAML format

Returns: 0 if success, 1 if file error, 2 if configuration error.

convertWellStringToNumber

Helper function.

Converts a microtiter plate well string (such as "B7") to a well number (such as 39), depending on plate size and plate orientation. Well #1 is defined as "A1".

Arguments:

Well String. Should be in the range: "A1" .. [total size of plate]

Size of plate (number of wells). Example: 96 or 384. Default is 96.

Orientation of plate, either "L" for landscape or "P" for portrait (default "L"). Landscape means, when looking at the plate on a table, the coordinates are defined for the long side running left-to-right, and the beginning row is the furthest away.

Returns:

Number > 0 (such as 43), if success.

0, if error.

convertWellNumberToString

Helper function.

Converts a microtiter plate well number (such as 54) to a co-ordinate string (such as "D5"), depending on plate size and plate orientation. Well #1 is defined as "A1".

Arguments:

Well number. Should be in the range: 1 .. [total size]

Size of plate (number of wells). Example: 96 or 384. Default is 96.

Orientation of plate, either "L" for landscape or "P" for portrait (default "L"). Landscape means, when looking at the plate on a table, the coordinates are defined for the long side running left-to-right.

Returns:

String (such as "A1"), if success.

Null string, if error.

convertWellStringToXY

Converts a microtiter plate well string (such as "E8") to an (x,y) coordinate array (such as (5,6)).

Arguments:

Well coordinate string. The top left well is defined as A1.

Size of plate (number of wells). Example: 96 or 384. Default is 96.

Orientation of plate, either "L" for landscape or "P" for portrait (default "L"). Landscape means, when looking at the plate on a table, the coordinates are defined for the long side running left-to-right, and the beginning row is the furthest away.

Returns:

Array (such as (8,8)), if success.

0, if error.

convertWellNumberToXY

Uses the other convertWell functions to convert a well number (1 .. (total size)) into (x,y) coordinates. See previous functions for args and return values.

AUTHOR

Jonathan Cline, <jcline at ieee.org>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-robotics at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Robotics. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc Robotics

You can also look for information at:

• RT: CPAN's request tracker

  http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Robotics

• AnnoCPAN: Annotated CPAN documentation

  http://annocpan.org/dist/Robotics

• CPAN Ratings

  http://cpanratings.perl.org/d/Robotics

• Search CPAN

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/Robotics/

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright 2009 Jonathan Cline.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.