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

Building and controlling a basic wheeled vehicle


To build this project, you'll want to start with a simple wheeled vehicle. There are many possibilities. The following is a two wheeled vehicle available at many online retail outlets like https://www.amazon.com or http://www.ebay.com:

First, you'll build the vehicle using the instructions that come with it. The vehicle uses two DC motors, so you'll control the direction and speed of your robot using a DC motor controller. Since it is so flexible and you are already familiar with it, you'll use the RaspiRobot Board V2. The following is an image of the board:

The specifics on the board can be found at http://www.monkmakes.com/?page_id=698. Connections to the board are very similar to the tracked vehicle connections that were described in Chapter 3, Building a Tracked Vehicle That Can Plan Its Own Path. You'll place the motor controller on top of the vehicle, connect the battery to the motor controller, and then connect both the motors, as shown...