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

Accessing the GPS programmatically and determining how to move to a location


Now that you can access your GPS device, let's work on accessing the data programmatically. Your project should now have the GPS connected and have access to querying the data via the serial port. In this section, you will create a program to use this data to discover where you are, and then you can determine what to do with that information.

If you completed the last section, you should be able to receive raw data from the GPS unit. Now you want to be able to take this data and do something with it; for example, find your current location and altitude, and then decide if your target location is to the west, east, north, or south.

First, get the information out of the raw data. As noted earlier, your position and speed are in the $GPMRC output of your GPS. Write a program to simply parse out several important pieces of information from that data. So open a new file (you can name it location.py) and edit it as follows...