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 the platform


Constructing the hardware and connecting it to the table is a significant challenge. Fortunately, there is an excellent website that explains how to construct the entire hardware system using three-dimensional printed parts at http://jjrobots.com/air-hockey-robot-a-3d-printer-hack/. This website even provides you with the opportunity to purchase the three-dimensional printed parts. Follow the detailed instructions to build the hardware. Here is a picture of the hardware that is connected to a small air hockey table that was purchased at a local toy store:

In the documented example, the controller is a laptop that is connected to a PlayStation 3 (PS3) Eye camera. For this project, you'll replace the laptop and PS3 camera with Raspberry Pi and a webcam. And instead of having Arduino calculate the paddle position, you'll be using Raspberry Pi. To understand how to do this, you'll first need to understand how to control stepper motors with Arduino and stepper motor drivers...