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

Downloading and installing OpenCV, a fully featured vision library


You'll need to install OpenCV, a complete vision library that provides an amazing array of tools for you to capture, process, and save your images. First, you'll need to download a set of libraries and OpenCV itself. There are several possible steps; I'm going to suggest one that I follow to install it on my systems. Once you have booted the system and opened a Terminal window, type the following commands in this order:

  1. sudo apt-get update: If you haven't done this in a while, it is a good idea to do this now before you start. You're going to be downloading a number of new software packages, so it is good to make sure everything is up to date.
  2. sudo apt-get install libavformat-dev: This library provides a way to code and decode audio and video streams.
  3. sudo apt-get install python-opencv: This is the Python development kit for OpenCV, which is required as you are going to use some Python to play with OpenCV; it is just too easy...