Regarding PLR Roadmap: Suggestion for FUN stuffs to be integrated in PLR

General
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I have read the very cool discussions about the PLR roadmap, as well as ideas to get more developers to contribute. I would like to ask if we could create and integrate functions that are not necessarily for lab uses but also for fun cases.

PLR is already cool as it is. But I think, if we can make it more fun, that would be more attractive. Some examples is before this I could control the opentrons rail light and also make the light follow music beat played on the OT-2 built in speaker. Also made function for copy-and-paste youtube link then it downloads a song and play it on built-in speaker. idk what else fun things can be done but i believe these robots should be ALIVE and make labs more fun. we already have atomic commands for controlling them. the liquid handler should be able to dance, some movements of other machines can also make sound, thus potential music. but im not sure where is the right place/folder to integrate these.

this can also help for marketing PLR and reach more potential developers/users :)) additionally, i also wish there are more videos or images of how other developers are using PLR (the cool, but less fun, ones)

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text-to-speech is a must…

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Dude :100:

this is specifically why i joined this forum. Everyone in automation is too serious!

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feel free to make PRs :smiley: im all for it

PLR is not just the most useful library, but also the most fun one (perhaps the only fun one)

also if you look carefully you might find some easter eggs in the repo already :wink: our fans might already know about some of them

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do you have any idea of what you wanna do or what you wanna see, that is currently feasible, for now :smiley:

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the OF name is already sounds sus ahaha… to confirm, current way of doing it is basically like how we do for adding other new machine class? eg we have liquid_handling, thermocycling.

so better to separate these fun machine classes, altho the same physical machine is the one executing both the work and fun stuffs? eg new types: talking, sound_generating, light_emitting.

im seeing a cooler and better human-robot interactions in the lab

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if you have specific ideas for improving human robot interaction in lab automation that require a separate module, we will do that

keep in mind though that we/i will have to maintain everything we merge. also PLR’s scope is a software layer interface to lab automation, and we can’t expand to cover everything

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most likely adding simple and not very high level ones in PLR, and anyone can build on that for their higher level library

agreed on the PLR scope, very important!

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Hi @hazlamshamin,

I love the idea!
Personally I won’t be able to make time to make our robots more talkative for a while because there are too many machines to integrate/unlock and I want to update the 2025 Q1-Q2 roadmap agenda to Q3-Q4 asap :slight_smile:

But if you want to enable more “verbal” communication with the machines, this is why Rick and I made the pylabrobot/audio package (see pylabrobot/pylabrobot/audio at main · PyLabRobot/pylabrobot · GitHub).

In PLR, you can very easily define new tracks via:

@_audio_check
def play_got_item():
  display(
    Audio(
      url="https://codeskulptor-demos.commondatastorage.googleapis.com/descent/gotitem.mp3",
      autoplay=True,
    )
  )

…and then execute the playing of a track by calling the function

Important note: we must check any audio files that are part of PLR to have the legal rights to be used in an open-source project.
Copyright and copyleft are always important but are especially sensitive topics in the audio and video industry - so please check always ahead of a PR :slight_smile:

The two example tracks we integrated so far are very basic, but I hope they showcase how this feature can be expanded to do some of what you are suggesting.

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Knowing there are shared interests in doing (or wanting) fun things to be integrated are more than good enough :smiley: let’s all try to make PLR cooler and more fun. i also wanna integrate more backend, but we will see if suddenly any random fun idea come across anytime :slight_smile:

may i know do any of the instruments you working with has built-in speakers? just surveying. an atomic command i can think of that can be useful for work and also fun stuffs is play_on_speaker for devices that support it. but unsure yet in which backend to integrate since different type of machines can have speaker.

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let you creativity run wild!