Periscope

This is the future of micromouse development.

The periscope feature allows the user to see exactly what is going on inside your micromouse. Enjoy.

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Problem

The current issue with the development of the micromouse is in debugging the maze-solving algorithm in the 
hardware. Aside from being time-consuming, it is confusing to diagnose an issue from a conglomerate stream 
of repetitive output or LED status lights. 

Solution

Streamline a protocol between the simulator and the micromouse to effectively animate the stream of data 
in a virtual environment. Along with animating the data, the user can enter a command in a text box to 
send to the micromouse and then view the response in a terminal-style serial monitor.

Architecture

A periscope packet gets sent from your micromouse to the simulator.

The user first connects to a device port in the drop menu, i.e. Bluetooth serial port cu.HC-06-DevB. The
simulator receives a periscope packet sent from the micromouse. Finally, once the packet is parsed the
virtual mouse renders an updated environment. Note, that concurrently a serial monitor is printing, in
plain text, the data being received from the micromouse.

Periscope Protocol:

Protocol (text-based):

send("Periscope: (16x16)(15,0)(north)(up)");

Periscope Protocol (byte-based): (inactive)

Serial Monitor Architecture

This is how your micromouse data gets outputted to a terminal style serial monitor.

The simulator receives the micromouse data and then streams it to an output file i.e. "/tmp/periscope.log".
Note that as soon as the user successfully connects to their device port - on the drop menu, a terminal 
window is created to automatically run the "periscopeSerialMonitor.sh" script. This script waits for
a new line of data to be written at the end of the log file then outputs it to the terminal console.