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

Seeing the puck using OpenCV


To know where the puck is, you'll need vision. Fortunately, adding hardware and software for vision for Raspberry Pi is both easy and inexpensive. First, you'll need to connect to a USB webcam.

Installing a USB camera on Raspberry Pi

Connecting a USB camera is very easy. Just plug it in the USB slot. To make sure your device is connected, type lsusb. You will see the following:

This shows a Logitech webcam located at Bus 001 Device 008: ID 046d:0825. To make sure that the system sees this as a video device, type ls /dev/v* and you will see something similar to the following:

The /dev/video0 is the webcam device. Now that your device is connected, let's see whether you can actually capture images and videos. There are several tools that can allow you to access the webcam, but a simple program with video controls is called guvcview. To install this, type sudo apt-get install guvcview. Once the application is installed, you'll want to run it. To do this, you'll either...