Terrapin started as a smart movement api for turtles. It provided some safer digging functions, movement functions and some extra basic inventory management functions.
Over time it has grown into a full-blown turtle OS. It is mainly geared to mining and farming tasks. It doesn't try to do any of the usual OS stuff like user management, password locks, those don't make much sense in the context of a turtle OS. That's also the reason there are no screenshots. Most of the things that terrapin does are unsexy.
It provides a robust set of tools for working with turtles. A complete set of digging tools :
- DigTunnel to dig ou areas from the side (eg. digging out a room)
- DigPit to dig out areas from the top
- DigStair to dig out stairs
- DigMine to dig mineshafts and automatically mine the available resources
It also has some landscaping tools :
- Fill to fill all the holes in an area
- Clear to flatten an area
- Replace to replace all the blocks in the floor or ceiling to make it uniform
It also has some tools for resource gathering. Here the idea isn't to maximise resource collection. These tools will not use bonemeal on your plants for example. If you are at a point in game where you have infinite bonemeal then you can spare some turtles to make severla large farms. If you are interested in contributing a patch to make the turtles use bonemeal go ahead.
- TreeFarm will allow you to set up a very cheap and efficient tree farm
- Farm will allow you to set up a small and efficient farm.
and some other more specialised tools you can find in the sidebar.
To install terrapin download the bootstrap script
terrapin/terrapin/programs/bootstrap.lua to one of your turtles or computers.
It will download 2 files : the actual installer and a confguration file that
tells it what to download. It will then run the installer and install
everything.
The whole packages is about 400kb is size most of which is due to the inclusion of lua penlight library. Penlight is a set of Lua modules that provide many useful methods. Most notably the tablex, stringx, class and lapp modules.
Future releases of this OS/API will tackle the task of removing some of the less used parts of penlight but this is not a big priority at the moment.
Terrapin is not compatible with other computercraft operting systems. This is
because APIs are not loaded with OS.LoadAPI but with the require method. For
the system to work the method needs to be injected into the shell during the
startup.
Once you have installed it head over to the documentation to get started.
Check out the scripts section to see what you can do with the API, check out the API documentation to learn how to use it.
Instead of using os.LoadAPI to load APIs I implemented a require function. This makes APIs more elegant since they can have some internal functions not available to the end user.
One of the more unusual features of Terrapin is the checkin functionality. The turtle will automatically send messages to a remote server to keep it updated of its status. This allows you to know what turtles are currently on, what they are doing and where they are.
Terrapin OS will work perfectly fine even if it doesn't have a server with which to talk to. You'll just be losing out on the cool dashboard.
By default turtles will ping the server every minute. The message wil contain the position of the turtle and its current position. You can also send messages to the server manually. This allows you to send progress reports for tasks for example.
Check out the documentation for the checkin module for more information on the client-side aspect.
To actually use the checkin API you need to have the checkin server running. Setting up will require Virtualbox and Vagrant.
-- TODO : Installation instructions --
When the VM is up it should start the server automatically. The server is implemented in Python on top of Flask + Tornado using Nginx as a reverse Proxy.
If there is enough demand I might take the time to set up a proper hosted instance somewhere and open it up to anybody who asks.