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 5: Backing Up the Code with Git and SD Card Copies

As you create and customize the code for your robot, you will invest many hours in getting it to do awesome things that, unless you take precautions, could all suddenly disappear. The programs are not the whole story, as you've already started configuring Raspberry Pi OS for use on the robot. You want to keep your code and config in case of disaster, and to be able to go back if you make changes you regret.

This chapter will help you understand how exactly code or configuration can break and the disasters you might face while customizing code for your robot. We'll then take a look at three strategies for preventing this.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

  • Understanding how code can be broken or lost
  • Strategy 1 – Keeping the code on a PC and uploading it
  • Strategy 2 – Using Git to go back in time
  • Strategy 3 – Making SD card backups