Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

The field of robotics is expanding, and this is the perfect time to learn how to create robots at home for different purposes. This book will help you take your first steps in planning, building, and programming a robot with Raspberry Pi Pico, an impressive controller bursting with I/O capabilities. After a quick tour of Pico, you’ll begin designing a robot chassis in 3D CAD. With easy-to-follow instructions, shopping lists, and plans, you’ll start building the robot. Further, you’ll add simple sensors and outputs to extend the robot, reinforce your design skills, and build your knowledge in programming with CircuitPython. You’ll also learn about interactions with electronics, standard robotics algorithms, and the discipline and process for building robots. Moving forward, you’ll learn how to add more complicated sensors and robotic behaviors, with increasing complexity levels, giving you hands-on experience. You’ll learn about Raspberry Pi Pico’s excellent features, such as PIO, adding capabilities such as avoiding walls, detecting movement, and compass headings. You’ll combine these with Bluetooth BLE for seeing sensor data and remotely controlling your robot with a smartphone. Finally, you’ll program the robot to find its location in an arena. By the end of this book, you’ll have built a robot at home, and be well equipped to build more with different levels of complexity.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics – Preparing for Robotics with Raspberry Pi Pico
7
Part 2: Interfacing Raspberry Pi Pico with Simple Sensors and Outputs
12
Part 3: Adding More Robotic Behaviors to Raspberry Pi Pico

Introduction to I2C communication

You encountered I2C communication in earlier chapters. Chapter 1, discussed how I2C is a data bus that carries address information, allowing a primary device such as Raspberry Pi Pico to reach multiple devices on a single bus. We learned then that Raspberry Pi Pico has two hardware I2C buses. I2C (or I2C) is an acronym for Inter-Integrated Circuit.

In Chapter 7, Planning and Shopping for More Devices, we saw how we would be using I2C devices both for VL53L1X distance sensors along with an IMU.

How exactly does this bus work? Chapter 1, also mentioned that I2C has two wires – a Serial Clock line (SCL) and a Serial Data line (SDA). The following picture shows how devices send signals through them:

Figure 8.4 – I2C signals on the wire

The preceding diagram shows two graphs representing I2C signals. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis when high is logic one, with low being logic zero. As shown...