Colony

Author: Alex Zirbel

Purpose: To improve debugging of all other parts of the system, and eventually develop a simulator.

Date Created: 17 Jan 2011.

This is a project by Alex Zirbel to help improve other tasks.

For debugging, it will really help to know what all the robots are doing and thinking.  Once we start with higher-level behaviors, we will also want a way to display what each robot's view of the world is, and any other information that we would like that robot to broadcast.

Statusbot will work by connecting one robot to the computer, which will use its XBee to receive all messages being sent.  All messages to statusbot will need to be sent with the STATUS descriptor in the packet, so that they are not interpreted by the other robots and so the statusbot will notice them.

Statusbot will then report all messages it gets to a main program running elsewhere, which can display a simulation of the robots' positions, or give the user options, or whatever else may be necessary.  The connection is simply the serial port.  Communication is one-way, with the main program listening and statusbot running independently.