Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Book Image

Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints

Overview of this book

The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is known as a tiny computer built on a single circuit board. It runs a Linux operating system, and has connection ports for various peripherals so that it can be hooked up to sensors, motors, cameras, and more. Raspberry Pi has been hugely popular among hardware hobbyists for various projects, including robotics. This book gives you an insight into implementing several creative projects using the peripherals provided by Raspberry Pi. To start, we’ll walk through the basic robotics concepts that the world of Raspberry Pi offers us, implementing wireless communication to control your robot from a distance. Next, we demonstrate how to build a sensible and a visionary robot, maximizing the use of sensors and step controllers. After that, we focus on building a wheeled robot that can draw and play hockey. To finish with a bang, we’ll build an autonomous hexcopter, that is, a flying robot controlled by Raspberry Pi. By the end of this book, you will be a maestro in applying an array of different technologies to create almost any imaginable robot.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Raspberry Pi Robotic Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring Raspberry Pi – The brain of your projects


A brief note before you start. In this book, you'll be using Raspberry Pi B2, a microprocessor that can run on the Linux operating system. The following is an image of the unit, with the different interconnectors labeled:

As this is an advanced projects book, you have already spent some time with Raspberry Pi and know how to write Raspbian/Wheezy on an SD card and boot your Raspberry Pi. If you don't, feel free to go to the Raspberry Pi website at https://www.raspberrypi.org/. Here you'll find all the instructions that you need to get your Raspberry Pi B 2 up and running.

Note that you may want to install your system on a microSD card that has at least 8 GB of memory. In some of the projects that you'll be building, you'll be installing some fairly significant pieces of open source software and you may not want to run out of memory.

Now you are ready to start with some simple product modification. Let's start with an RC car; you'll replace the transmitter and control the car with a wireless connection on Raspberry Pi.