droiddeck-backend

DroidDeck is a production-grade robotics control platform designed for WALL-E animatronic robots. It replaces legacy solutions with a unified system built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Steam Deck interface. The backend is a Python asyncio WebSocket server with shared serial management and motion mixing, while the frontend is a PyQt6 Steam Deck application with real-time telemetry, scene editing, and controller calibration. A Flask/Socket.IO web interface is also available on port 5000. Hardware control covers dual Pololu Maestro 24-channel servo controllers sharing a single UART, a NEMA 23 stepper motor with TB6600 driver, and a Sabertooth 2×60 brushed motor controller for tank drive. An ESP32-CAM provides video streaming with gesture recognition. Safety features include emergency stop, limit switches, a hardware watchdog, voltage/current monitoring, and failsafe defaults. The motion system uses layered blending with joystick, idle, and scene layers, plus a constraint pipeline for velocity limiting and position clamping. Bottango animations can be imported through a folder watcher that converts exported JSON into internal scenes with cubic bezier interpolation, or controlled live over TCP for testing before export. Configuration is handled through JSON files with hot reloading. The README documents hardware wiring, power supply, DIP switch settings, installation, Bluetooth controller pairing, WebSocket API commands, and troubleshooting for serial, stepper, Bottango import, and live driver issues.