BraitenBot GUI

A Tauri desktop application for designing Braitenberg-style robot wiring diagrams and uploading them to Arduino-compatible hardware. A web build for GitHub Pages is also available for demo/classroom use.

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What is a Braitenberg Vehicle?

Braitenberg Vehicles are simple thought-experiment robots whose emergent behaviour arises from wiring sensors to motors. This GUI focuses on composing those circuits visually.

Features

Feature	Details
Diagram-first editor	Drag-and-drop vehicle circuit diagram
Extensible sensors	Analog, digital, and I2C sensor nodes
Connections by dragging	Drag links from node outputs to valid node inputs
Intermediate compute nodes	Threshold, delay, summation, and multiply nodes
Arduino code generation	Emit a .ino sketch from the diagram
Desktop upload	Upload to the robot via bundled arduino-cli (Tauri build)
Web fallback	Installable PWA for demo/classroom use — diagram editing and code generation only (no device upload)

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥ 18
• npm ≥ 9
• Rust toolchain (for the Tauri desktop build — see tauri.app/start/prerequisites)

Desktop (primary)

npm install
npm run tauri:dev     # run the desktop app in development
npm run tauri:build   # produce a distributable desktop bundle

npm run tauri:dev automatically runs the frontend dev server via Vite; you do not need to run npm run dev separately.

Web build (secondary, for GitHub Pages)

npm run dev:web       # Vite dev server with the PWA plugin enabled
npm run build:web     # static site output in dist/ (base path /braitenbot-gui/)
npm run preview       # preview the built site locally

Project Structure

src/
├── main.tsx                     # React entry point
├── App.tsx                      # Root layout
├── App.css                      # Global styles
├── vite-env.d.ts                # Vite client type reference
├── types/
│   └── diagram.ts               # Core diagram types (nodes, connections, transfer curves)
├── components/
│   ├── BraitenbergDiagram.tsx   # Drag-and-drop node and connection editor
│   ├── SetupModal.tsx           # First-run Arduino setup dialog
│   └── TransferCurveEditor.tsx  # Per-connection transfer curve editor
├── hooks/
│   ├── useArduino.ts            # Arduino detect/compile/upload via Tauri
│   ├── useDiagramPersistence.ts # Local-storage persistence for the diagram
│   └── useTraceSimulation.ts    # Signal-flow simulation/tracing
├── codegen/                     # Diagram → .ino sketch emitter + validation
├── lib/
│   ├── diagramFile.ts           # Diagram import/export helpers
│   └── tauri.ts                 # Tauri environment detection + invoke helpers
src-tauri/                       # Rust Tauri shell (bundles arduino-cli)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.