vector-skills

Skills (tricks) for an Anki Vector robot running on wire-pod: face-screen animations, sounds, speech and small moves, each in one self-contained JSON file.

A skill is data only, with no code in it. The robot's software checks every value (motion limits, sizes, length) before running anything, and runs the steps strictly one after another.

What's here

skill	what it does	endings
pacman	An arcade jingle, then one eye becomes Pac-Man and eats the other eye's dots, waka by waka.	escape, chased, caught
peekaboo	He hides behind his lift with his eyes shut, then drops it, pops his eyes wide open and says "Peekaboo!"	once, twice

• index.json: the catalogue a robot reads to see what's available (name, title, length, endings, SHA-256)
• skills/<name>.json: the skills themselves
• FORMAT.md: the d5-trick format, version 1
• engine/trick_engine.py: checks, previews and performs skills (Python; Pillow, plus the Vector SDK to perform)
• tools/: build_index.py (rebuild the catalogue) and check_skills.py (what the pull-request check runs)
• sources/: generators for skills that are easier to write as code (python3 sources/make_pacman.py)

Using these on your Vector

With Python 3, Pillow and the Vector SDK (pip install pillow wirepod_vector_sdk, set up for your robot as the SDK describes):

python3 engine/trick_engine.py check skills/pacman.json --gif pacman.gif   # no robot needed
python3 engine/trick_engine.py play skills/pacman.json --serial <your robot's serial>

The engine came from one wire-pod setup with an MCP server ("D5"), which installs skills from this repository by itself. Two things learned the hard way, for anyone building their own player:

• Never stream audio while sending face-screen frames: doing both at once jammed the robot's SDK service until it was restarted. Show a frame, then play the sound; the frame stays up meanwhile.
• Sounds under ~0.35 s can fail to play, and very long single clips (~30 s) can fail too: pad short sounds with silence and split long speech into sentences.

Adding a skill

Contributions are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md. In short: write skills/<name>.json, check it with python3 engine/trick_engine.py check, rebuild index.json, and open a pull request. An automatic check validates it and attaches preview animations, and every skill is reviewed before it's merged.

Notes

Pac-Man is a trademark of Bandai Namco Entertainment; pacman is an unofficial fan trick drawn from simple shapes, and its jingle and sound effects are original, not the arcade's.

Licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE).