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

Creating a program in Python to control the mobile platform


Now that you can control your servos by using a basic command-line program, let's control them by programming movement in Python. In this section, you'll create a Python program that will let you talk to your servos a bit more intuitively. You'll issue commands that will tell a servo to go to a specific angle and it will go to that angle. You can then add a set of such commands to allow your robot to move forward, backward, or position the claw to any specific location.

Let's start with a simple program that will make your robot's servos turn 90 degrees; this will be somewhere close to the middle of the 180 degree range that you can work within. However, the center, maximum, and minimum values can vary from one servo to another, so you may need to calibrate them. To keep things simple, we will not cover this here. The following screenshot shows the code that is required for turning the servos:

The following is an explanation of the...