Make: JavaScript Robotics

Preface

By Rick Waldron

I love programming and I also love making things. When I discovered Chris Williams’ node-serialport module (for Node.js), I remember thinking, “Now I can program the things that I make.” So I did! I contributed an Arduino sketch that printed a photoresistor sensor value to the open serial port and a small JavaScript handler program that listened for data and printed a “graph” to the terminal. Months later, I started contributing to Cam Pedersen’s duino project, until Julian Gaultier approached me with his JavaScript implementation of the Firmata protocol. From there, we set out to build a collection of high-level component classes with one goal: to make it easy and fun to control hardware with JavaScript. ...