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

Accessing the compass programmatically


Now that the device is connected, you'll need to configure access via the software. Following are the steps:

  1. In order to access the compass capability, you'll need to enable the I2C library on Raspberry. The first step in enabling the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is to enable the I2C interface. The I2C interface is a synchronous serial interface and provides more performance than an asynchronous Rx/Tx serial interface. The SCL data line provides a clock while the data flows on the SDA line. The bus also provides addressing so that more than one device can be connected to the master device at the same time. To enable this bus, run sudo raspi-config and select the 8 Advanced Options, as follows:

  2. Then go to the A7 I2C selection and enable the I2C, as shown in the following:

  3. Make all the selections to enable the I2C interface and load the library, and then reboot Raspberry Pi.

  4. You'll also need to edit the /etc/modules file and add the following two...