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

Chapter 2. Programming the BeagleBone Blue

Before you get started with building your robotic projects, let's take a bit of time to either introduce or review how to program the BeagleBone Blue.

In this chapter, you will:

  • Learn some of the basic Linux commands and get to know how to navigate around the filesystem on the BeagleBone Blue
  • Learn how to create, edit, and save files on the BeagleBone Blue
  • Learn how to create and run Python programs on the BeagleBone Blue
  • Learn how the C programming language is both similar and different from Python so you can both create and edit C code files

Now that things are up and running, you'll want your BeagleBone Blue to start doing something. Almost always, this requires you to either create your own programs or edit someone else's programs. This chapter will provide a brief introduction to basic Linux commands and Python and C programming.

While it is fun to build hardware, and you'll spend a good deal of time actually designing and building your robots; without...