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 robot

We have parts and rough ideas for how to mount our sensors.

Using the techniques learned in Chapter 3, Designing a Robot Chassis in FreeCAD, we can model these brackets and shelves in FreeCAD. You can also get these designs from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Robotics-at-Home-with-Raspberry-Pi-Pico/tree/main/ch-07.

The following image shows what this looks like in FreeCAD 3D View:

Figure 7.5 – The chassis with the sensor mounts

In the preceding figure, there is a 3D view of the robot in FreeCAD. At the rear, above the batteries, is a shelf for the Bluetooth and IMU. There are bolt holes under this in the chassis.

At the front of the figure are the two brackets for the distance sensors, with mounting holes for the sensors and slots cut out for the connection header to poke through.

Let us take a closer look at each sensor mounting design.

Designing the shelf

We will make the shelf with styrene. The following...