cylon/examples/robot_commands/robot_commands.markdown

Robot Commands

This example demonstrates a feature of the Cylon API: running arbitrary commands on robots over HTTP. To demonstrate this, we're going to make a basic robot, with a custom command. This in and of itself is nothing to write home about, but you'll be able to trigger the custom command by visiting this URL in your browser:

http://localhost:8080/robots/frankie/commands/relax

First, let's make sure to load up Cylon:

var Cylon = require('../..');

Now that we've got that, let's set up a custom API port:

Cylon.api({ host: '0.0.0.0', port: '8080' });

And with that done let's define our robot. We'll make a class to contain this robot's logic:

var MyRobot = (function() {
  function MyRobot() {}

To let the API know what commands this robot has, we need to provide a commands array.

  MyRobot.prototype.commands = ["relax"];

And with that done, we can now define the method. The result of this method will be returned to the HTTP client as part of a JSON object.

  MyRobot.prototype.relax = function() {
    return "" + this.name + " says relax";
  };

Since we don't really care what actual work this robot does, but need to keep it busy, we'll just tell it to print it's name every second.

  MyRobot.prototype.work = function(me) {
    every((1).seconds(), function() {
      console.log(me.name);
    });
  };

  return MyRobot;

})();

And with that all done, we can now instantiate our robot:

var robot = new MyRobot;

Now we can just give it a name and send it off to Cylon.

robot.name = "frankie";
Cylon.robot(robot);

And now that all the pieces are in place, we can start up Cylon:

Cylon.start();

Now the robot will print it's name to the console, and Cylon will serve an API to localhost:8080. Check it out!.