Robotics at Home with Raspberry Pi Pico

Design, build, and program a mobile robot platform while gaining a solid understanding of the Raspberry Pi Pico, FreeCAD, and robot sensors. Learn to program it in Python, connect via Bluetooth and control it with your smartphone.

Key Features

• Gain step-by-step knowledge on robotics with easy-to-follow instructions
• Build a rover platform designed for experimentation and extension
• Enhance your robot construction skills by planning and building electronics and code

Book Description

This book will help you take your first steps in planning, building, and programming a robot with Raspberry Pi Pico, an impressive controller bursting with IO capabilities. After a quick tour of the Pico, you will begin designing a robot chassis in 3D CAD. Then, with easy-to-follow instructions, shopping lists, and plans, you will build the robot. After this, you will add simple sensors and outputs to extend the robot, reinforcing design skills. You will build knowledge in programming with CircuitPython, and understand interactions with electronics, standard robotics algorithms, and the discipline and process for building robots. Moving forward, the book shows you how to add more complicated sensors and robotic behaviors, with each chapter adding capabilities to the robot and giving you hands-on experience. You'll learn Raspberry Pi Pico's excellent features like PIO, adding capabilities like avoiding walls, detecting movement and compass heading. You will combine these with Bluetooth BLE for seeing sensor data and remote control with a smartphone. Finally, you will program the robot to find its location in an arena. By the end of this book, you will be confident to build another robot of your own. You will have skills, tools, materials and a test arena. The book ends with inspiration and information on continuing to learn and build robots.

What you will learn

• Interface Raspberry Pi Pico with Motors and move things
• Design in 3D CAD with FreeCAD
• Build a simple robot and extend it
• Interface Raspberry Pi Pico with sensors and Bluetooth BLE.
• Visualize robot data with Matplotlib
• Learn robotics algorithms on Pico for smart behavior
• Learn the skills needed to build further robots

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at beginner makers at home, keen hobbyists, technical people with curiosity, developers and STEM teachers. Some basic prior knowledge of coding - beginner to intermediate programming will be helpful. If you are looking to learn robot construction skills and are not afraid to solder a little, this book is for you.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Raspberry Pi Pico
2. Preparing Raspberry Pi Pico
3. Designing a Robot Chassis in FreeCAD
4. Building a Robot Around Pico
5. Driving Motors with Raspberry Pi Pico
6. Planning and Shopping for More Sensors
7. Sensing Distances to Detect Objects with Pico
8. Detecting Movement with Encoders on Raspberry Pi Pico
9. Teleoperating Raspberry Pi Pico Robot with WiFi
10. Using the PID Algorithm to Follow Walls
11. Controlling Motion with Encoders on Raspberry Pi Pico
12. Detecting Orientation with an IMU on Raspberry Pi Pico
13. Determining Location with Monte Carlo
14. Continuing Your Journey - Your Next Robot