Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

BeagleBone Blue is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today’s desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions that enable anyone to use this new, low-cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways. The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components. This includes guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully, and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Blue. You will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including making the system see using a webcam, hear using a microphone, and speak using a speaker. You will then learn to use the new hardware capability of the BeagleBone Blue to make your robots move, as well as discover how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects. Later, you will learn to remotely control your robot through iOS and Android devices. At the end of this book, you will see how to integrate all of these functionalities to work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: Drone and Submarine.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Connecting the hardware and making an input sound


To start, you are going to hook up the hardware and make and input sound. Plug in the power and SSH into the BeagleBone Blue. Now type in cat/proc/asound/cards. You should see the following response:

Note that the system indicates that you are connected to your USB audio plugin. Now you can use the USB card to both create and record sound.

First, let's get some music going. This will let you know that your USB sound device is working. You'll need to first configure your system to look for your USB card and play and record sound from there as the default. To do this, you'll need to add a library to your system. Install the library include files by typing sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev. This will install the basic capability that you need.

Let's make sure your system knows about your USB sound device. At the prompt, type in aplay -l. You should see the following:

Once you have added the libraries, you'll need to add a file. You are going to...