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

Attaching the light strip to the Raspberry Pi

Before we write code to display color sequences on the LED SHIM, we need to attach it to the Raspberry Pi on our robot. After we have finished this section, the robot block diagram will look as in Figure 9.3:

Figure 9.3 – The robot block diagram with the LED strip

The block diagram now shows the LED strip connected to the Raspberry Pi, with an arrow indicating information flow from the Raspberry Pi to the strip. The strip is highlighted as a new addition to the system. Let's see how this works.

Attaching the LED strip to the robot

The Pimoroni LED SHIM attaches quite readily to the Raspberry Pi. We put it on top of the motor controller, with its pass-through header, so that we can see the lights on top. Take a look at Figure 9.4 to see how:

Figure 9.4 – Fitting the LEDs

Use Figure 9.4 with the following steps to attach the strip:

  1. The strip is small...