Activities/Turtle Art/Plugins

Plugins

As of Version 106, there is plugin support for Turtle Art. The basic idea is to let developers add new palettes and blocks to support additional functionality without having to make changes to any of the core Turtle Art packages. If a plugin is present, it is loaded when Turtle Art is launched and any palettes or blocks defined by the plugin are made available to the user.

The plugin mechanism is currently used to provide support for sensors, the camera, RFID, and the Media, Extras, and Portfolio palettes. A plugin has been developed for WeDo and additional plugins are being developed for Arduino, NXT, and GoGo.

How to install a plugin

Plugins are typically distributed as a *.tar.gz archive

In Gnome, click on the link in your browser and open with Archive Manager, extract the files in the plugins directory of the archive to

/home/olpc/Activities/TurtleArt.activity/plugins

you may need to make the Activities directory writeable first, in Terminal type

chmod 777 /home/olpc/Activities

If your distribution does not include Gnome, the following command in Terminal will download the Physics archive to the current directory

wget http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/c/c1/Physics-plugin.tar.gz
(need instructions on gzip and/or tar here)

(need instructions here if root is denied, do you download TA and plugin to another directory and execute python turtleart.py ?

Available plugins

These plugins would typically already be installed

turtleart-extras
turtleart-camera
turtleart-sensors

Project Butia

This plugin adds an extra pallette for the Butia robot (link to just plugin plse)

Currency

This plugin adds a pallette of currency (notes and coins), these items can be acted on by arithmetic operators

File:Oz-coins.tar.gz Australian coins plugin

File:Oz-bills.tar.gz Australian bills plugin

File:Oz-coins-and-bills.tar.gz Australian coins and bills plugin

File:US-currency.tar.gz US dollar plugin

File:Rwanda-currency.tar.gz Rwanda francs plugin

File:Paraguay-currency.tar.gz Paraguay Gurani plugin

File:Colombia-currency.tar.gz Colombian peso plugin

File:Mexican-currency.tar.gz Mexican peso plugin

File:US-bills.tar.gz US bills plugin

Physics

This plugin allows you to construct a Physics model which can be saved to the Journal and run with the Physics Activity Activities/Physics

File:Physics-plugin.tar.gz Physics plugin

How to write a plugin

To add a plugin, simply drop a file into the plugins directory. The file must end with _plugin.py and the base class in the file must be descendent from the Plugin class defined in plugin.py

Note that the name of your new class much match the name of the file, but with the first letter capitalized, e.g.:

camera_plugin.py contains:

class Camera_plugin(Plugin):

Turtle Art called the __init__ method when starting up and traps import errors as its means to determine whether or not a plugin has the resources it needs to run. (You may want to remove this exception handler when debugging your plugin. It is in the _init_plugins method in tawindow.py.) It then calls the setup method when creating the palettes. It calls the start method whenever a stack of blocks is run and the stop method when execution is over. Also, there are methods for goto_background, return_to_foreground, and quit. (These methods are typically ignored.)

Adding a new palette is simply a matter of:

   palette = make_palette('mypalette',  # the name of your palette
                          colors=["#00FF00", "#00A000"],
                          help_string=_('Palette of my custom commands'))

For example, if we want to add a new turtle command, 'uturn', we'd use the add_block method in the Palette class.

   palette.add_block('uturn',  # the name of your block
                     style='basic-style',  # the block style
                     label=_('u turn'),  # the label for the block
                     prim_name='uturn',  # code reference (see below)
                     help_string=_('turns the turtle 180 degrees'))

   # Next, you need to define what your block will do:
   # def_prim takes 3 arguments: the primitive name, the number of
   # of arguments, 0 in this case, and the function to call, in this
   # case, the canvas function to set the heading.
   self.tw.lc.def_prim('uturn', 0, lambda self: self.tw.canvas.seth(self.tw.canvas.heading + 180))

That's it. When you next run Turtle Art, you will have a 'uturn' block on the 'mypalette' palette.

You will have to create icons for the palette-selector buttons. These are kept in the icons subdirectory. You need two icons: mypaletteoff.svg and mypaletteon.svg, where 'mypalette' is the same string as the entry you used in instantiating the Palette class. Note that the icons should be the same size (55x55) as the others. (This is the default icon size for Sugar toolbars.)