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

Moving the paddle with Arduino code


The first step in making the entire system work is to test the motors. Fortunately, the GitHub site, https://github.com/JJulio/AHRobot, has the code that can make this happen. Download and unzip the code. Look in the AHRobot-master/Arduino/Utils/AHR_Motor_Test directory for the AHR_Motor_Test.ino program file. This file provides a simple test program to move the three stepper motors, first the x-axis stepper motor that moves the paddle back and forth across the table and then the y-axis stepper motors, the two motors which move the paddle forward and backward.

Note

If you are unfamiliar with how to develop and upload code for Arduino Mega, go to the https://www.arduino.cc/ website. It has a detailed set of instructions and an open source IDE for Arduino.

Run the program and open the Serial Port. You will see the following as the paddle moves:

If everything is connected correctly, the paddle should first move across the table, then move forward. If it does...