Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

Thanks to new, inexpensive microcontrollers, robotics has become far more accessible than it was in the past. These microcontrollers provide a whole new set of capabilities to allow even the most inexperienced users to make amazingly complicated projects. Beaglebone is effectively a small, light, cheap computer in a similar vein to Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It has all of the extensibility of today's desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. This project guide provides step-by-step instructions to allow anyone to use this new, low cost platform in some fascinating robotics projects. By the time you are finished, your projects will be able to see, speak, listen, detect their surroundings, and move in a variety of amazing ways. The book begins with unpacking and powering up the components.This will include guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully–and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Black. Chapter by chapter, we will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including how to make the system see using a webcam, how to hear using a microphone, and how to speak using a speaker. We then add hardware to make your robots move–including wheeled and legged examples–as well as covering how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects, plus wireless control to make your robot truly autonomous. Adding GPS allows the robot to find itself. Finally the book covers how to integrate all of this functionality so that it can all work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: those that can sail, fly, and explore underwater.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BeagleBone Robotic Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Hooking up the HW to make and input sound


For this task, you are going to hook up your HW so that you can record and play sound.

Prepare for lift off

Reassemble your BeagleBone Black. Plug in the LAN cable. Connect the powered USB hub and plug in the microphone/speaker USB device. Also plug in your speakers and the microphone.

Plug in the power. You can execute all of the following instructions in one of the several ways.

If you are still connected to the display, keyboard, and mouse, log in to the board, use startx to start Xfce (your windowing system), and then open a terminal window.

If you are only connected via LAN, you can do all of this using an SSH terminal window, so as soon as your board flashes that it has power (look for the heartbeat LED), open up an SSH terminal window using PuTTY or some similar terminal emulator. Once the terminal window comes up, log in with your username and password. Now type in cat /proc/asound/cards. You should see the following response:

Notice that the system...