search

ev3dev-python-tools / ev3dev2simulator

Simulator for an EV3 robot; a program using the ev3dev2 API can run both on the rover and on the simulator without any modifications to the code
MIT License
6 stars 9 forks source link

readme

ev3dev2simulator: simulator for the EV3 (ev3dev2 API)

The behaviour of the EV3 robot is simulated in the simulator. This is convenient to quickly test programs when you momentarily don’t have access to an EV3.

ev3dev2simulator

You can use the 'ev3dev2' python library to program the EV3. The simulator installs a fake 'ev3dev2' library on the PC. When using this library on the PC, every call to this API is forwarded to the simulator which uses it to simulate the behaviour of the EV3 robot.

For an example see: https://github.com/ev3dev-python-tools/thonny-ev3dev/wiki/Simulator-example
The running program can be seen in the following video: http://www.cs.ru.nl/lab/ev3dev2simulator.html .

The thonny-ev3dev plugin makes it easier to program the EV3 programmable LEGO brick using the Thonny Python IDE for beginners. The thonny-ev3dev plugin for the Thonny IDE comes with the ev3dev2simulator.

For more info about the thonny-ev3dev plugin see: https://github.com/ev3dev-python-tools/thonny-ev3dev/wiki
For more info about Thonny: http://thonny.org

Getting started

Prerequisites needed only for Linux

For Macos and Windows you don't need any prerequisites, but for linux you do.

The pyttsx3 python speech library uses system libraries in its implementation. For Macos/Windows the used system 'speak' libraries are always available, but for linux you must sure these are installed with:

 sudo apt update && sudo apt install espeak ffmpeg libespeak1

For linux there are is no binary distribution available for simpleaudio. The Python 3 and ALSA development packages are required for pip to build the extension. For Debian variants (including Raspbian), this will usually get the job done:

 sudo apt-get install -y python3-dev libasound2-dev

Installation

Recommended is to use python 3.8 - 3.10, because for newer versions of python for some dependencies of ev3dev2simulator no wheels(binary) packages are build. In latter case a c-compiler must be installed on the system to build these packages from source when installing. Installing a c-compiler for compiling python packages is not an easy task.

Install python3.8, python3.9 or python 3.10

  Download Python installer from https://www.python.org/downloads/: 
  - 3.8.10 is the latest 3.8 version with installers. 
    https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3810/
  - 3.9.13 is the latest 3.9 version with installers.
    https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3913/  
  - 3.10.11 is the latest 3.10 version with installers.
    https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-31011/

Install with pip:

  pip install ev3dev2simulator

For Windows and Macos all binary dependencies are provided by wheels on pypi, however for Linux the binary extenssion for simpleaudio is compiled when installing.

Then you can just run the simulator by running the executable:

  ev3dev2simulator

The simulator works on all python versions 3.8 till python 3.12. For python 3.11 and 3.12 the installation requires building some dependent packages from source.

Using the simulator

The user guide of the simulator can be found on the wiki.