The Future Is Robotic

Sphero launches updated SDK

Ever since Sphero’s debut, we’ve tried to make it developer-friendly by not only providing low-level API documentation but by also including native Android and iOS SDKs. Today we’re happy to announce version 3 of our native mobile software development kit (SDK).

With the Sphero platform growing, the time develop Apps for the world of Connected Play™ is better than ever. Apps like Tickle and Tynker are already using this SDK to provide a robotic experience to their users.

“The new Sphero SDKs provide the foundation for building creative Connected Play experiences by removing the technical friction of connecting, controlling, and interacting with our robots.” says Wes Felteau, Director of Emerging Technologies.

New Features

The new SDKs include a new common Robot Discovery Agent for building cross-robot applications that make connecting, controlling, and streaming data from a Robot a trivial affair. The Convenience Robot class encapsulates many of the common functions and commands that a developer might want as well as easy access to sensor data, driving, color changes, and aiming. For example, driving a robot is as simple as:

[ robot driveWithHeading:90.f andVelocity:.5f ];
...
[ robot stop ];

The new iOS and Android SDKs are available at sdk.sphero.com, with the Unity revamp coming later this summer.

Javascript API

In addition, we would like to introduce to you Sphero.js, our JavaScript API for Sphero. With support for the full Sphero API, it is designed to work using Node.js/io.js on Windows, Linux and OS X. Additionally, Sphero.js can be used directly inside of Chrome Apps.

We love giving back to the community that’s been so great to us, so we’ve also made the library fully open-source, along with pre-crunched data for velocity and IMU. It’s never been easier to get so much interesting data from a cool little robot.

For more information about getting involved in the Sphero developer community, check out our documentation, forums, and follow us@SpheroDev on Twitter.

Happy hacking.

The Sphero SDK Team