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

Setting up Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi and enabling SSH

Now you've seen what you get with a headless system, let's modify the SD card so the Raspberry Pi starts up ready to use as a headless device. We need to set up Wi-Fi first:

  1. Remove and reinsert the MicroSD card we made earlier into your computer so that the computer can recognize the new state of the drive.
  2. Now you will see the card shows up as two disk drives. One of the drives is called boot; Windows will ask whether you want to format the other drive. Click Cancel when Windows asks you. This part of the SD card holds a Linux-specific filesystem that Windows cannot read.
  3. Now, in boot, create two files as follows. I suggest using an editor such as VSCode for plain text files, seeing file extensions, and making empty files:
    • ssh: An empty file with no extension.
    • wpa_supplicant.conf: This file contains your Wi-Fi network configuration as shown here:
      country=GB
      update_config=1
      ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant...