Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

We live in an age where the most difficult human tasks are now automated. Smart and intelligent robots, which will perform different tasks precisely and efficiently, are the requirement of the hour. A combination of Raspberry Pi and Python works perfectly when making these kinds of robots. Learn Robotics Programming starts by introducing you to the basic structure of a robot, along with how to plan, build, and program it. As you make your way through the book, you will gradually progress to adding different outputs and sensors, learning new building skills, and writing code for interesting behaviors with sensors. You’ll also be able to update your robot, and set up web, phone, and Wi-Fi connectivity in order to control it. By the end of the book, you will have built a clever robot that can perform basic artificial intelligence (AI) operations.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Attaching the light strip to the Raspberry Pi

Before we can write code to display color sequences on our LEDs, we need to wire them to our Raspberry Pi and attach them to our robot. After we have finished this section, the robot block diagram will look like the following:

The robot block diagram with the LED strip

Logic levels

To attach an RGB LED strip to the Pi, we need to be aware that the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins operate at 3.3V, and the majority of these lights operate with logic at 5V. This logic level voltage applies to the high digital level. If we try to drive these directly from the Pi, at too low a voltage, the results may be inconsistent at best. If we are signalling back to the Pi, too high a voltage will damage...