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

Detecting Orientation with an IMU on Raspberry Pi Pico

Our robot can track how far it’s moved, but what about tracking which direction the robot is facing? Or how far it has turned? In this chapter, we will learn about the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a device that can track the motion of the robot measured against gravity and the Earth’s magnetic field.

We’ll look at how to select one of these devices, get it connected and then write code for it on our robot using the PID controller to steer the robot based on the IMU data.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

  • What is an IMU and how to choose one
  • Connecting the IMU to the robot
  • Calibrating and getting readings
  • Always face North behavior
  • Making a known turn behavior