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

Chapter 4. Building a Robot That Can Play Laser Tag

In the previous chapters, you've modified an RC car to control it remotely using Raspberry Pi, you've modified a toy robot to respond to your voice commands and you've also built a tracked vehicle that uses sensors to avoid the barriers and arrive at a desired location. In this chapter, you'll leverage some of these capabilities and then add other capabilities so that you can build a pair of wheeled robots to play laser tag.

In this chapter you'll learn the following:

  • Construct a simple two-wheeled platform

  • Leverage the wireless LAN interface and a USB webcam to control your robot via a remote computer

  • Add a joystick to your host computer

  • Connect Raspberry Pi to a laser source

  • Connect Raspberry Pi to a laser receiver

  • Send and receive laser signals programmatically to enable the laser tag capabilities of your robot