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

Choosing device types

We will add other sensors and Bluetooth to communicate with our robot. We will look in depth at each in later chapters, but we should know enough to consider which we will buy. This section will involve taking a brief overview, making some trade-offs, and choosing the parts to use.

Distance sensors

Distance sensors, briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, let the robot sense its situation and surroundings to avoid or follow obstacles. Some kinds only return if a distance has crossed a threshold, but the more suitable types return a sensed distance value. We will focus on this latter type.

Most distance sensors bounce a beam from objects and measure their return time or angle to determine the distance. For example, clap opposite a wall in a large open space, and you will hear how long your echo takes to return. If you move further from the wall, the return time will be longer.

These fall into two major categories: sound-based and light-based. Each has pros...