Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Overview of this book

The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is known as a tiny computer built on a single circuit board. It runs a Linux operating system, and has connection ports for various peripherals so that it can be hooked up to sensors, motors, cameras, and more. Raspberry Pi has been hugely popular among hardware hobbyists for various projects, including robotics. This book gives you an insight into implementing several creative projects using the peripherals provided by Raspberry Pi. To start, we’ll walk through the basic robotics concepts that the world of Raspberry Pi offers us, implementing wireless communication to control your robot from a distance. Next, we demonstrate how to build a sensible and a visionary robot, maximizing the use of sensors and step controllers. After that, we focus on building a wheeled robot that can draw and play hockey. To finish with a bang, we’ll build an autonomous hexcopter, that is, a flying robot controlled by Raspberry Pi. By the end of this book, you will be a maestro in applying an array of different technologies to create almost any imaginable robot.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Controlling the tracked vehicle using Raspberry Pi in Python


The first step to access the functionality is to install the library associated with the control board, which can be found at http://www.monkmakes.com/?page_id=698. You'll create a Python code that will allow you to access the two motors, similar to what you did in the first chapter. The first part of the code, which should look almost the same as the code that you created in the first chapter, will look as follows:

Now, the second part of the code that will drive the two different motors based on whether you want to go forward, backward, or turn right or left is as follows:

As previously discussed, the rr.set_motors() function allows you to specify the speed and direction of each motor independently. Now that you have the basic code to drive your tracked vehicle, you'll need to modify this code so that you can call these functions from another Python program. You'll also need to add some calibrated movement so that your tracked...