XiBot Is On The Drawing Board

As a summer project, I am planning on building a simple Raspberry PI 3 based robotic vehicle using XideKit for the control transport. To control and monitor the little beast,  I have cobbled together a tkinter GUI that currently looks like this:

Tkinter made it fairly easy to create ( the logic to connect the GUI to the hardware is still a work in progress) and my hope is that with the aid of XideKit, I can attach this GUI to either my custom little robot, a Sparkfun RedBot, or any other robot for that matter (with a XideKit adapter of course).without having to change one line of GUI code. In fact the GUI allows you to select up to 3 robots to control no matter what the platform (the XiBot is a Raspberry PI device and the RedBot is Arduino based).

Tkinter meets almost all of my needs for a GUI. The code is relatively easy to write, tkinter is included as a standard part of Python, and as a result will run on Windows, Mac or Linux. Mobile devices on the other hand are not readily supported. If you know of a way to run tkinter on an Android or iOS device, please let me know. And so, I already have a "Phase 2" planned using a Python based GUI library called Kivy. Kivy applications can be run on mobile devices as well as desktop operating systems. To this end, I have cobbled together the following Kivy GUI that is similar to the center panel of tkinter effort.

I was able to create this in about 3 hours, so I am hopeful that I will be able to complete it to support all of the features of its tkinter cousin, and also be able to run on an Android tablet or phone from a single set of source files.

I will post my progress as this project progresses.

This is going to be busy summer.