Making a motor work without using class structure

BrickPi
1

I have a piece of code that works, but am wondering if there is way to get it to work without instantiating a BrickPi3 object at the start.

At present my code looks like this:

import brickpi3
import time

BP = brickpi3.BrickPi3() 
speed = 30
stop = 0


inkey = raw_input()
if inkey == " ":
   print ("running forward")
   BP.set_motor_power(BP.PORT_A, speed)
   time.sleep(2)
   print ("stop")
   BP.set_motor_power(BP.PORT_A, stop) 
   BP.reset_all()

It will run a motor for 2 seconds when the space bar is pressed followed by enter.
I want to make it simpler for students so they don’t need to worry about classes. Any ideas. Also is there a simple way to get the motor to work by pressing the spacebar without having to then press the enter key?

Any ideas most appreciated.

3

Instantiation creates the object to work with, and it also does a little hardware configuration, confirms that the BrickPi3 is connected, and ensures it is running a version of firmware compatible with the Python drivers.

If you don’t want to have to explain what BP = brickpi3.BrickPi3() does, perhaps just group it with import brickpi3 and explain it as “a necessary line of code to use the BP3”.

4

Hi @shabysheik1,

In order to use the keyboard for controlling the robot I’d use curtsies package.
Please take a look at how the following project is implemented:

Thank you!