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

Mission planning software


The mission planning software is available at http://planner.ardupilot.com/. There are actually two applications available that perform similar actions, but the Mission Planner is a good place to become familiar with how to talk with your quadcopter from a computer program.

To do this, you'll need to make sure you have telemetry radios connected to the Pixhawk and the computer. This will prevent the need of directly connecting to the Pixhawk with a long USB cable. When you begin the mission planning software, you will see the following screen:

This is the basic screen. You'll then need to configure your radio's COM port and then press the CONNECT button in the corner on the upper right-hand side. As you move the quadcopter around, you will see the measurements change. If you are having problems connecting to the Pixhawk, there is lot of help available at the website.

Now that you have connected, you can actually see how your quadcopter is flying from this application...