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

Creating and running Python programs on the BeagleBone Blue


Now that you can get around and even edit programs, you can begin to use the BeagleBone Blue to create programs so you can control your robotic projects.

Now that you are ready to begin programming, you'll need to choose a language. There are many available: C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and a great deal of other possibilities. You'll use Python initially for two reasons. First, it is a simple language that makes intuitive sense and is very easy to use. Second, much of the open source functionality in the robotics world is available in Python. You'll also learn a bit of C in this chapter as well because sometimes, functionality is only available in C. But it makes the most sense to start in Python. To work the examples in this section, you'll need a version of Python installed to complete this section. Fortunately, the basic Debian system has a version already installed, so you are ready to begin. You can see what version is installed...