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

Some basic programming constructs on the BeagleBone Blue


Now that you know how to run a simple Python program on the BeagleBone Blue, let's look at some more complex programming constructs. Specifically, you'll learn what to do when you want to decide what instructions to execute and show how to loop your code to do the same thing more than once. You'll learn how to use libraries in Python code and how to organize statements into functions. Finally, you'll learn about some very basic object-oriented concepts.

As with the previous section, once you have the basic system and Emacs, you are ready to start coding. As you have seen, your programs normally start with the first line of code and then continue executing the next line until your program runs out of code. This is fine, but what if you want to decide between two different courses of action? You can do this in Python using an if statement. Here is some example code:

Here is the detail, line by line:

  1. #!/usr/bin/python: This is included so...