Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By : Danny Staple
Book Image

Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

By: Danny Staple

Overview of this book

We live in an age where the most complex or repetitive tasks are automated. Smart robots have the potential to revolutionize how we perform all kinds of tasks with high accuracy and efficiency. With this second edition of Learn Robotics Programming, you'll see how a combination of the Raspberry Pi and Python can be a great starting point for robot programming. The book starts by introducing you to the basic structure of a robot and shows you how to design, build, and program it. As you make your way through the book, you'll add different outputs and sensors, learn robot building skills, and write code to add autonomous behavior using sensors and a camera. You'll also be able to upgrade your robot with Wi-Fi connectivity to control it using a smartphone. Finally, you'll understand how you can apply the skills that you've learned to visualize, lay out, build, and code your future robot building projects. By the end of this book, you'll have built an interesting robot that can perform basic artificial intelligence operations and be well versed in programming robots and creating complex robotics projects using what you've learned.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics – Preparing for Robotics
7
Section 2: Building an Autonomous Robot – Connecting Sensors and Motors to a Raspberry Pi
15
Section 3: Hearing and Seeing – Giving a Robot Intelligent Sensors
21
Section 4: Taking Robotics Further

Chapter 9: Programming RGB Strips in Python

LED lights can be used with a robot to debug and give it feedback so that the code running on the robot can show its state. Colored RGB LEDs let you mix the red, green, and blue components of light to make many colors, adding brightness and color to a robot. We have not paid much attention to making it look fun, so this time we will focus on that.

Mixing different sequences of LEDs can be used to convey information in real time. You can use which are on/off, their brightness, or their color to represent information. This feedback is easier to read than a stream of text, which will help as sensors are added to the robot. This also means the code on the robot can show state without relying on the SSH terminal to do so.

In this chapter, we will learn the following:

  • What is an RGB strip?
  • Comparing light strip technologies
  • Attaching the light strip to the Raspberry Pi
  • Making a robot display a code object
  • Using the...