Chapter 2. Building Your Own Futuristic Robot

Now that you are up and running, let's start with a simple but impressive project in which you'll take a toy robot and give it much more functionality. You'll start with an R2D2 toy robot and modify it to add a webcam, voice recognition, and motors so that it can get around.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Using the Raspberry Pi to control two DC motors

• Hooking up the hardware to make and input sound

• Using eSpeak to allow our projects to respond with a robot voice

• Using PocketSphinx to accept your voice commands

• Using Python and the other tools to interpret commands and initiate actions

• Hooking up a USB webcam so that you can add vision to your project

• Downloading and configuring OpenCV so that your project can use this amazing open source software to detect objects, faces, colors, and motion

Creating your own R2D2 will require a bit of mechanical work; you'll need a drill and perhaps a Dremel tool, but most of the mechanical work will...