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

Preparing the CircuitPython library for Pico

CircuitPython is a good starting point—it gives you the basics that we will be using—but we will also be interfacing with other hardware. The CircuitPython library, united across many devices with the same version of Pico, creates an interface you can take with you to other microcontrollers should you want to try others out.

Let’s use the following steps to prepare a module from the library:

  1. Open the CIRCUITPY drive on your computer and find a folder called lib. This is the target for libraries.
  2. Download the CircuitPython Library Bundle from https://circuitpython.org/libraries. The version you download should match the version of CircuitPython you downloaded before.
  3. This gets you a ZIP file. Expand the ZIP contents, and you should get a folder with a README, examples, and a lib folder. We will keep this handy. When we need libraries from here, we copy them over to Pico.
  4. The whole library is too...