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

Constructing a drawing platform using servos and brackets


To begin the project, you'll first need to build a robot arm to do the drawing. There are several robotic arms, which are available at many online electronics outlets and eBay, that would do well for this application. A less expensive approach would be to use a set of servo brackets and construct your robotic arm. The following is an image of this arm:

To construct this arm, you can purchase a set of servo brackets on eBay or look for a kit that uses a six degrees of freedom (DOF) mechanical robotic arm at any one of the several online electronics retailers. You can either build the kit or an arm of your own design. Remember to make sure that you get servos with enough torque. For the upper end of the arm, almost any servo will do. For the servo attached at the base and up the chain, you'll need servos with fairly significant torque capabilities. I like to use the HS-645MG servos by Hitec for this application, they have metal internal...