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

Reading the temperature

  1. With the device wired and attached, you'll want to try some code on it to confirm we can talk to this device and get data out of it. Let's get some tools installed and make it work.

    Installing the software

    Before we can start interacting with this device, as with most devices, we will install a helper library to communicate with it. Pimoroni, the suppliers of the ICM20948 module I've suggested, have made a handy library for Python to talk to it. I recommend taking their latest version from GitHub.

    Perform the following steps to install it:

    Boot up the Raspberry Pi on the robot. This Pi should have been used previously for the motor board and LED shim and have I2C enabled. If not, go back to Chapter 7, Drive and Turn – Moving Motors with Python, and follow the steps for preparing the I2C.

  2. Type in i2cdetect -y 1 to check that you've installed the device correctly. The output should look like this:
    pi@myrobot:~ $ i2cdetect -y 1
      ...