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

Giving your robot voice commands


Now that your robot knows how to respond to the commands from the Python program, you can now add the capability to your robot to respond to voice commands. You'll also add the capability to allow your robot to speak, this will make the robot more interactive.

To add these capabilities to your robot, you'll need to add some hardware. This project requires a USB microphone and speaker adapter. Raspberry Pi itself has an audio output but does not have an audio input. So, you'll need the following three pieces of hardware:

  • A USB device to plug in a microphone and speaker

  • A microphone that can plug into the USB device

  • A powered speaker that can plug into the USB device

Fortunately, these devices are inexpensive and widely available. Make sure that the speaker is powered because your board will generally not be able to drive a passive speaker with enough power for your applications. The speaker can use either internal battery power or can get its power from a USB connection...