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

Positioning a servo motor with the Raspberry Pi

To position a servo, we need to set up a servo horn to see it move, and then plug it into the motor controller board. A servo horn is a small collar with one or more arms, usually used to connect the servo spindle/axle to a mechanism they move. Figure 10.5 shows how to attach a horn to a servo:

Figure 10.5 – Fitting a servo horn

The images in Figure 10.5 show how to fit a servo horn. Perform the following steps:

  1. Servo motors usually come with small bags of hardware, containing a few different horn types and screws to attach them to the servo and the parts you want them to move.
  2. Use the very short small screws for this, as the longer screws can break the servo.
  3. Screw a one-armed servo horn into the servo. The long collar of the horn fits over the servo's output spindle.
  4. The servo should now look like this. Don't over-tighten the collar screw, as you may need to loosen it...