Book Image

Practical Arduino Robotics

By : Lukas Kaul
Book Image

Practical Arduino Robotics

By: Lukas Kaul

Overview of this book

Every robot needs a “brain,” and the Arduino platform provides an incredibly accessible way to bring your Arduino robot to life. Anyone can easily learn to build and program their own robots with Arduino for hobby and commercial uses, making Arduino-based robots the popular choice for school projects, college courses, and the rapid prototyping of industrial applications! Practical Arduino Robotics is a comprehensive guide that equips you with the necessary skills and techniques that can be applied to various projects and applications, from automating repetitive tasks in a laboratory to building engaging mobile robots. Building on basic knowledge of programming and electronics, this book teaches you how to choose the right components, such as Arduino boards, sensors, and motors, and write effective code for your robotics project, including the use of advanced third-party Arduino libraries and interfaces, such as Analog, SPI, I2C, PWM, and UART. You'll also learn different ways to command your robots wirelessly, such as over Wi-Fi. Finally, with basic to advanced project examples, this book illustrates how to build exciting autonomous robots like a self-balancing telepresence robot. By the end of this book, you'll be able to design and create your own custom robots for a wide variety of applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Selecting the Right Components for Your Robots
6
Part 2: Writing Effective and Reliable Robot Programs for Arduino
10
Part 3: Building the Hardware, Electronics, and UI of Your Robot
15
Part 4: Advanced Example Projects to Put Your Robotic Skills into Action

Using the Arduino IDE for testing and debugging

There are several methods of testing the modules of your robot program. If you write a piece of code that can make an LED blink with variable frequency, you can create the desired frequency with a potentiometer and use an LED to see if the blinker code is reacting correctly to the input signal. However, the Arduino IDE provides us with two additional powerful tools for testing and debugging: the Serial Monitor and the Serial Plotter. Although we have used them in previous chapters already, let us take a deeper dive into both and learn how we can use them as very effective tools in our development process.

Using the Serial Monitor as input

The Arduino IDE’s Serial Monitor is a character-based interface to send and receive data to and from a connected Arduino via its Serial interface. So far, we have only used it to receive and display data to show the output of the program that runs on your Arduino. But it can also be used...