Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

Thanks to new, inexpensive microcontrollers, robotics has become far more accessible than it was in the past. These microcontrollers provide a whole new set of capabilities to allow even the most inexperienced users to make amazingly complicated projects. Beaglebone 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 to allow 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 will include guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully–and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Black. Chapter by chapter, we will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including how to make the system see using a webcam, how to hear using a microphone, and how to speak using a speaker. We then add hardware to make your robots move–including wheeled and legged examples–as well as covering how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects, plus wireless control to make your robot truly autonomous. Adding GPS allows the robot to find itself. Finally the book covers how to integrate all of this functionality so that it can all work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: those that can sail, fly, and explore underwater.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BeagleBone Robotic Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Downloading and installing OpenCV – a full-featured vision library


Now that you have your camera connected, you can begin to access some amazing capabilities that have been provided by the open source community. The most popular of these for computer vision is OpenCV.

Prepare for lift off

Now you need to install OpenCV, a complete vision library that provides tools for you to use to capture, process, and save your images. Before you do this, you need to expand the partition on your SD card so that you can download all the applications that you need. When you wrote the Linux operating system to your SD card, you copied a 2 GB image; so now your card thinks it is only a 2 GB card, no matter what size it really is. You need to reclaim this space.

To do this, you'll need to issue some fairly cryptic commands, but you can use the defaults, so it will be straightforward. First, open a terminal window. The card I am using is an 8 GB card, so if your card is of a different size, you might not see the...