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

A brief introduction to the C programming language


You've been introduced to a simple programming language in Python. Now let's introduce a more complex but powerful language called C. C is the original language of Linux and has been around for many decades but is still widely used by open source developers. It is similar to Python, but it is also a bit different, and since you may need to both understand and make changes to C code, you may need to be familiar with it and how it is used.

As with Python, you will need to have access to the language capabilities. These come in the form of a compiler and build system, which turns your text files that contain programs to machine code that the processor can actually execute. To do this, type sudo apt-get install build-essential. This will install the programs you need to turn your code into executables for the system.

Now that the tools are installed, let's walk through some simple examples. Here is the first C code example:

And here is an explanation...