I made a little presentation, a hack, a spike into the world of the unknown. I wanted to see if I could power a johnny-five robot with redux a powerful state manager for JavaScript commonly used with ReactJS. I could, I did, and I think you should too. The code in this presentation gets a little handwavey. I did get it working but never finished getting both the browser side simulation and the hardware controlling processes to share the same stat…

Earlier this week we had this year's first NodeBots NYC event! Andrew and Myself were happy to host. We need to thank About.com for giving us food, space and heat.

As you may know, we share our library of electronics with ScriptEd, a non-profit which teaches programming in under-resourced schools around the city. So we were quite overjoyed when the NYC conference, Empire Node, donated their Arduino kits from their conference this past Fall. Thes…

In 2014 our plan was twofold; Help small business's dreams come true and to be a model for how we'd like our industry to operate. In 9 months we came close to achiving everything we wanted to. Close enough that I don't think we were ambitious enough.

In March 2014 after hanging out with the Flatiron BK-000 class for 4 months, I did an open call for applicants. I was starting a new dev shop and I wanted them. My theory was that I could teach them…

I was recently helping Sara debug an issue with a project for an upcoming book she's writing a chapter in. She was using Johnny-Five and a Spark Core to remotely control a boat with JavaScript.

The Setup

The setup was a sparkfun motor driver and a standard servo hooked to A0 and A1 of the Spark Core.

Sara had one submersible thruster on the boat hooked up to the motor driver and a rudder hooked up to the servo. She was using VoodooSpark with Jo…

I had the absolute pleasure to join the people at Ghostalk the other day for their last episode of the season. They let me talk aboutrobots, Wizard Development, programming education, more robots and even how to contribute to their Ghost Blogging Platform.

Take a listen here

-Francis

Yesterday at JSConf 2014 we had a nodebots event. (We also had noderockets, nodeboats and nodecopters.) One of my favorite bots is below.

We have a lot of different parts here.

• A laser gun from Bithound
• A sparkcore from SparkDevices
• A pawelbot from sumobotkit.com
• Two Continues Servos
• Some relays to control the gun
• A Pebble watch to drive and shoot

Facebook sponsored the entire event. So props to them for making it happen.

I'm still hunting …

I don't write a ton of nodejs modules. I work on a few*, and I don't even work on them as much as I like. However I do end up using a ton of them. Here are some cool things I'd like to see that would make my life easier as a node developer.

Historical Versions

We see the latest readme, and the latest version number, but no info on the old versions. You'd have to go download them and check their readme's and and docs.

More support for docs

The rea…

I've been asked a few times what to buy when starting with electronics, especially when it comes to micro-controllers and sensors. You're going to end up buying a ton of parts while exploring. You'll have a hard time using a lot of these components until you're comfortable with their conventions. It's also important to make sure your everything works together.

For starters, lets go with a kit - the SparkFun Inventors Kit.

It comes with a wonderf…

Yesterday marked the end of a several week sprint to improve tests around Johnny-Five. My goal started with fixing an inconstantly failing test, innocent enough. Today I'm proud to say we have cleaner code, a faster suite runtime, and a further decoupling of objects and libraries within the project. I learned a lot about testing in javascript, and I'm finally able to publicly share code I've written with regards to testing. A lot of this I'd love…

Recently I won a trip to NodeConf (a conference about nodeJS) by making a cool little game called "You Laugh You Lose". It was created in 17 hours at NodeJitsu's "Hack Nodeconf Hackathon". After a full days work my friend Mike and myself wandered over to Pivotal Lab's awesome offices near union square and proceeded to stay up for the next 24 hours. This blog post is about how that went.

First off get a cool browser and play the game!

Inception

Me…