Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By : Richard Grimmett
Book Image

BeagleBone Robotic Projects - Second Edition

By: Richard Grimmett

Overview of this book

BeagleBone Blue 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 that enable 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 includes guidance on what to purchase and how to connect it all successfully, and a primer on programming the BeagleBone Blue. You will add additional software functionality available from the open source community, including making the system see using a webcam, hear using a microphone, and speak using a speaker. You will then learn to use the new hardware capability of the BeagleBone Blue to make your robots move, as well as discover how to add sonar sensors to avoid or find objects. Later, you will learn to remotely control your robot through iOS and Android devices. At the end of this book, you will see how to integrate all of these functionalities to work together, before developing the most impressive robotics projects: Drone and Submarine.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using eSpeak to allow our projects to respond in a robot voice


Now that we can both get sound out of your BeagleBone Blue, let's start doing something useful with this capability. You're going to start by enabling eSpeak, an open source application that provides us with a computer voice with a bit of personality.

The great news is that here, you get a huge check of functionality for free. The program you are going to use is eSpeak, an open source voice generation application. To get this functionality, download the eSpeak library by typing sudo apt-get install espeak. Now, let's see whether your BeagleBoard Blue has a voice. Type the command espeak "hello". The speaker should emit a computer voiced hello. If it does not, make sure that the speaker is on and that its volume is high enough to hear it.

Now that you have a computer voice, you may want to customize it. eSpeak offers a fairly complete set of customization features, including a large number of languages, voices, and other options...