Welcome to the Smartcar shield library. These pages are intended to provide information on how to use the library's API with explanations and examples for every exposed method.

If you are viewing this as source code or as a single page on github.com, please go to the dedicated documentation pages on github.io. These pages are automatically generated by Doxygen and Travis CI after every commit, meaning that they are the most probable source of up-to-date documentation.

Click on the Classes tab for documentation on the various classes and Files for an overview of the dependencies between the different packages.

About the library

The library sports a high level API, meant to enable its users to perform tasks easily with relatively few lines of code. It intends to hide implementation details or low level hardware operations. The library, handles the various components (i.e. the vehicle and the various sensors) as objects, therefore enabling trivial control over the car's functions.

The examples are primarily tailored to be used with the Smartcar Shield which was the hardware initially coupled with this software. However, by using different arguments the different classes can be reused with practically any Motor and Control combination common to miniature vehicles. Additionally, a plethora of hobby-grade sensors are supported which potentially makes this library the only external component necessary for many robotic or autonomous driving use cases, when it comes to programming the microcontroller.

Extending the library

All classes implement an interface which allow you to create library extensions and give you the possibility of writing code that can be reused among different platforms and hardware setups. Furthermore, despite the library written for Arduino-compatible microcontrollers, potentially any microcontroller could be used by providing your own implementation of the Runtime interface.