XMRemoteRobot

XMRemoteRobot is focussed on being small and efficient for our particular robot remote control and telemetry needs - which may be your needs. Test drive a working example at: https://r2.manukautech.info/

Video of remote control of a small vehicle.

The code is written to be clearly understandable so it can double as an education resource for the new ASP.NET Core technology. XMRemoteRobot stays with HTTP which keeps it firewall friendly and working well in an education institute environment where more exotic socket communications are often blocked. HTTP keeps XMRemoteRobot in the zone of machine-reading of json-formatted text from machine-friendly web pages a.k.a. web services which we think of as web pages for robots to look at.

Download and run this on a Windows machine with Visual Studio 2017 installed. We use the "Community Edition" which is free of charge for education, individuals and small businesses. You also need to download and install Core 2.0 SDK or Runtime from: https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/core

In starting XMRemoteRobot I chose to make use of a database to store and manage signal messages in transit. Other apps go for in-memory management. In theory reading and writing to a database should carry a speed penalty but Microsoft SQL Server does extensive caching in memory so I thought we should try it. Early results indicate that when a signal message takes 0.20 seconds on its journey, 0.01 second of that is database read/write. That suggests a penalty of only 5 percent but it may be a little less than that because in-memory processing is not perfectly instant. The database advantages include: easier and clearer coding; ability to log conversations.

This app is an output from research, teaching and learning activities at the Manukau Institute of Technology in New Zealand.