SwiftyTJ

This is a TJ Bot recipe for controlling the LED from a Swift program.

This is an experimental recipe that has only been tested on Raspian (Jessie).

How It Works

As of this writing, there is no support for the NeoPixel LED in Swift. Therefore, we use the following architecture:

Swift —> Node.js —> NeoPixel LED

Our Swift program will communicate over a socket with a Node.js server which uses the rpi-ws281x-native library to control the LED.

Prerequisites

Before using this recipe, you need to install the Swift 3.0 runtime for your Raspberry Pi, as well as the clang toolchain.

Install Swift-3.0

Grab the latest build of Swift-3.0 for ARM processors.

$ wget http://swift-arm.ddns.net/view/Swift%20on%20ARM/job/Swift-3.0-ARMv7-ubuntu1410/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/swift-3.0-2016-10-21-armv7-ubuntu14.04.tar.gz

There may be a newer build than what is referenced above. Please check the Jenkins build page for a newer version.

Extract the archive.

$ tar xzvf swift-3.0-2016-10-21-armv7-ubuntu14.04.tar.gz

Add swift-3.0/usr/bin to your $PATH. I keep it in my Downloads folder, but you can move it wherever you want in the file system (e.g. /opt/swift-3.0).

$ export PATH=~/Downloads/swift-3.0/usr/bin:$PATH

You can add this line to the bottom of your .bashrc file to ensure Swift is always included in your $PATH.

Test to see what version of swift you have.

$ swift --version
Swift version 3.0-dev (LLVM 545d4be6ac, Clang 968470f170, Swift ac8b5bd472)
Target: armv7--linux-gnueabihf

Install clang

Installing clang is required for Swift to be able to invoke the llvm linker.

$ sudo apt-get install -y clang

Build

Now that swift-3.0 is installed, let’s build the Swift client application.

$ cd SwiftyTJ/Client
$ sh build.sh

The build script will invoke swiftc, the Swift compiler, to build the Swift client. It will output a binary named main.

As of this writing, swift-build-tool does not work on Raspberry Pi. This means that we cannot use swift build to build our app, nor can we use the Swift Package Manager to load 3rd party libraries. Our recipe has a dependency on BlueSocket, and we have included its sources directly. We also provide a Swift implementation of OpcClientStream that mirrors the client functionality from the openpixelcontrol-stream npm package.

Next, install the dependencies for the server.

$ cd ../Server
$ npm install

Run

First, run the server.

$ ./background.sh
nohup: appending output to ‘nohup.out’

The background.sh script will run the Node.js server in the background (using nohup). The Node.js server is run using sudo because it needs root permissions to control the LED.

The next step is to head back to the Client folder and start changing the color of the LED!

$ cd ../Client

The main program takes one argument on the command line, which is the color to which the LED should be set. It understands some colors by name (e.g. “red”, “green”, “blue”, “orange”, “aqua”, and more). It also understands colors specified in hexademical, such as “0x00FF00” (red) and “8B021A” (green).

Colors are specified as GGRRBB, not the usual RRGGBB.

Try changing the colors around.

$ ./main red
changing pixel color to ff00
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 0100000300ff00
$ ./main green
changing pixel color to ff0000
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 01000003ff0000
$ ./main orange
changing pixel color to a5ff00
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 01000003a5ff00
$ ./main yellow
changing pixel color to c1ff35
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 01000003c1ff35
$ ./main 332288
changing pixel color to 332288
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 01000003332288
$ ./main 0x82C497
changing pixel color to 82c497
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 0100000382c497
$ ./main off
changing pixel color to 00
connected to localhost:7890
wrote 7 bytes to socket: 01000003000000

You will see a status message printed each time you run main showing the color to be used for the LED, and the status of connecting to the Node.js server.

If there is a problem connecting to the server (e.g. because it isn’t running), you will see an error message.

$ ./main red
changing pixel color to ff00
failed to connect to localhost:7890
could not write data

To turn off the Node.js server, you need to find its process ID (PID) using the ps command and then terminate it using the kill command. The process you’re looking for is named sudo nohup node server.js. Make a note of the PID (1127 in our case) and use that in the kill command.

$ ps au
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
…
root      1127  0.0  0.3   6780  3116 pts/0    S    09:16   0:00 sudo nohup node server.js
…
$ sudo kill 1127

Make sure to use sudo to kill the process because it’s owned by root.

Where to go from here

There are a few additional things to try out with SwiftyTJ.

Explore all of the colors you can set the LED to (hint: look in main.swift). Try adding some more colors!
Have some fun with disco mode! Try running disco.sh from the command line. Notice how the color order is the same every time? Can you re-implement this in Swift to make the color selectin random? (hint: look in main.swift for a section to uncomment).
(Advanced). Make TJ play music during disco mode!
(Advanced). Add the watson-developer-sdk to the Node.js server and make TJ speak from Swift using the Speech to Text service.

As the Swift 3.0 build matures on Raspberry Pi, it should become easier to include 3rd party libaries to provide additional functionality. For example, the Watson iOS SDK is written in Swift, but may need to have iOS-specific dependencies factored out in order to run on Raspberry Pi.

Dependencies

Swift

Swift 3.0
BlueSocket. Native Swift socket library.

Node.js

rpi-ws281x-native. npm package to control a ws281x LED.
openpixelcontrol-stream. Provides a stream-implementation for interfacing with the openpixelcontrol-protocol.

License

This library is licensed under Apache 2.0. Full license text is available in LICENSE.

jweisz/swifty-tj