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

Simple drawing using the robotic arm


You can now ask your arm to hold a drawing pen by simply opening the claw, inserting a pen, and closing the claw. You'll probably want to use some sort of marker or other drawing device with a wide tip and lots of color. The following is the arm holding the pen:

If you adjust the servo that moves the entire arm up and down, you can make the pen touch the paper, as follows:

Finally, if you move the servo that turns the base, you can draw your first curved line, similar to the following image:

This is wonderful, but drawing only curved lines will not be particularly useful; besides, an interface where the user enters the servo locations one at a time to try and draw a more complex drawing will be unacceptable. What you need is a program that takes an x-y location input and moves the robotic arm to that point with the proper servo positions.

Since the input coming from the computer will be the x and y location for a point, you'll need to translate that value...