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

Planning a Robot with Raspberry Pi Pico

When you plan, you create the best chance for a mission’s success. We want to build robots in an achievable way. Let’s start with a plan in mind! We’ll use this plan to explore why Raspberry Pi Pico is a great fit for this and make a shopping list!

In this chapter, you’ll learn about Raspberry Pi Pico’s capabilities. You’ll discover CircuitPython and understand why it is a great language for Raspberry Pi Pico. Additionally, we’ll plan a robot design and understand the trade-offs to make choices about the robot early in the project. We’ll check that our robot fits together, working out the parts and tools you’ll need with suggestions on how to get them.

At the end of the chapter, you’ll have both a plan and parts arriving so that you are ready to build a robot. Additionally, you’ll have a starting process for making other robots and setting yourself up for success with them.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

  • What is Raspberry Pi Pico, and why is it suitable for robotics?
  • What is CircuitPython?
  • Planning a Raspberry Pi Pico robot
  • Test fitting a Raspberry Pi Pico robot
  • A recommended shopping list for robot basics