Blog

Nov

06

2014

Cylon 0.20.0 is out!

by Andrew Stewart

As part of our continued lead up to Cylon 1.0.0, we've just finished releasing Cylon 0.20.X.

This set of changes impact module developers more than users, but there's still some goodies in there to be found!

For a full changeset, see the compare page on GitHub.

For Application Developers

• Browser & Mobile support: - Cylon.js now has full browser support, and can run on mobile devices too! We've even set up some examples for you! For more details, see our blog post that covers it in detail.

• Log levels: - Cylon's logger now has log level support; and will automatically log anything over info level. This can be customized with a configuration value.

• Logger configuration: - One of the last outliers, Cylon's Logger configuration has been relocated to Cylon#config. For example:

  var CustomLogger = require('./custom-logger');
  
  Cylon.config({
    logging: {
      logger: CustomLogger,
      level: 'debug'
    }
  });
  

• Test-Driven Robotics config changes: - when writing test-driven robotics, indicate you're in test mode through Cylon#config:

  Cylon.config({
    testMode: true
  });
  

• Explicitly specify modules: - when creating a robot, you can explicitly tell Cylon which module it should attempt to load Drivers/Adaptors from:

  Cylon.robot({
    name: 'testbot',
  
    connections: {
      myspark: {
        adaptor: 'myspark',
        module: 'cylon-spark'
      }
    },
  
    devices: {
      led: { driver: 'led', pin: 9, module: 'cylon-gpio' }
    },
  
    work: function() {
    }
  });
  

This isn't necessary in most cases, as Cylon.js is typically smart enough to find the module automatically. However, if you are using a custom module, or a module with multiple adaptors, this may prove helpful.

For Platform Developers

• Registry: - this is the biggest change in 0.20.0, and significantly simplifies how Cylon submodules are registered with Cylon. When writing the main file for a Cylon module, the previous syntax was something like the following (using cylon-spark as an example):

  var Cylon = require('cylon'),
      GPIO = require('cylon-gpio');
  
  var Adaptor = require("./spark-adaptor"),
      Driver = require("./spark-driver.js"),
      VoodooSpark = require("./voodoospark-adaptor"),
  
  module.exports = {
    adaptor: function(args) {
      if (args.adaptor === 'spark') {
        return new Adaptor(args);
      } else if (args.adaptor === 'voodoospark') {
        return new VoodooSpark(args);
      }
    },
  
    driver: function(args) {
      return new Driver(args);
    },
  
    register: function(robot) {
      Cylon.Logger.debug("Registering Spark adaptor for " + robot.name);
  
      robot.registerAdaptor('cylon-spark', 'spark');
      robot.registerAdaptor('cylon-spark', 'voodoospark');
  
      robot.registerDriver('cylon-spark', 'spark');
  
      GPIO.register(robot);
    }
  };
  

This is a bit messy, and involves loading up Cylon + Cylon-GPIO to just to register the module. Here's the new syntax:

var Adaptor = require("./spark-adaptor"),
    Driver = require("./spark-driver.js"),
    VoodooSpark = require("./voodoospark-adaptor"),

module.exports = {
  adaptors: ['spark', 'voodoospark'],
  drivers: ['spark'],
  dependencies: ['cylon-gpio'],

  adaptor: function(args) {
    if (args.adaptor === 'spark') {
      return new Adaptor(args);
    } else if (args.adaptor === 'voodoospark') {
      return new VoodooSpark(args);
    }
  },

  driver: function(args) {
    return new Driver(args);
  }
};

Now, the module's supplied Adaptors and Drivers are presented as simple arrays, with a dependencies array to indicate which other modules are supported by this one. For example, cylon-firmata indicates that cylon-gpio and cylon-i2c are dependencies.

This change hopefully reduces clutter for module developers, and makes it easy to see at a glance what a Cylon module provides for adaptors and drivers.

• extraParams removal: - all params passed in the connection/device configuration objects are now kept there, instead of put into extraParams.

  // for the connections hash:
  connections: {
    spark: { adaptor: 'spark', accountToken: 'YOUR_ACCOUNT_TOKEN', deviceId: 'YOUR_DEVICE_ID' }
  }
  
  // Cylon 0.19.0 - Spark adaptor constructor:
  opts.extraParams.accountToken // => 'YOUR_ACCOUNT_TOKEN'
  
  // Cylon 0.20.0 - Spark adaptor constructor:
  opts.accountToken // => 'YOUR_ACCOUNT_TOKEN'
  

More Hardware Support

And as always, no Cylon.JS release would be complete without additional hardware support. We're now up to 31 platforms, adding the following:

• cylon-ble for Bluetooth Low-Energy peripherals
• cylon-powerup for the PowerUp glider (powered by cylon-ble)
• cylon-wiced-sense for the WICED Sense BLE tool from Broadcom
• cylon-mqtt for communicating using the [MQTT protocol]

For more updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @CylonJS.