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 your USB camera to your BeagleBone Blue and viewing the images


Our first step in enabling computer vision is to connect your USB camera to your USB port on the BeagleBone Blue. For this example, you'll use an iHome webcam, a standard USB webcam available at many electronics online outlets. To make sure you can access your USB webcam, I like to use a program called guvcview. Install this by typing sudo apt-get install guvcview.

Connect your USB camera. Then, apply power to the BeagleBone Blue. After the system is booted, you can check whether the BeagleBone Blue has found your USB camera. Go to the /dev directory and type ls. You should see something like this:

What you are looking for is the video device; this is our webcam. So if you see it, then you can be sure that the system at least knows that your camera is there.

Now let's use guvcview to view the output of the camera. Since this is going to need to output some graphics, you'll need to use VNC server. To use a VNC server,...