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

Controlling your robot via a game pad controller


You've assembled your robot and can now control it via the BeagleBone Blue. You can run the control program using a VNC server configuration. Doing this will allow you basic control of the robot wirelessly. However, it would be easier to control your quadcopter using a game controller.

What you want is a controller that has more immediate control of the different aspects of your robot. Perhaps the most practical is a game controller that has two joysticks and several additional buttons. Using these as input mechanisms will make controlling your robot with the BeagleBone Blue much easier.

To add the game controller, you'll need to first find a game controller that can connect to your computer. If you are using Microsoft Windows as the OS on the host computer, then pretty much any USB controller that can connect to a PC will work. The same type of controller also works if you are using Linux for the remote computer. In fact, you could use another...