Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects

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...

Amazon Customer Oct 03, 2018

Great wealth of information.

Amazon Verified review

Thomas L. Jun 01, 2019

I really like the way this book is organized. It gives all of the information that would be needed for the projects described inside, among which are an interactive R2-D2, Wall-E, and others. If you have some previous experience with the pi, building these projects shouldn't be a problem. It gives a nice overview of a lot of different, modern tools that can be used on the platform. I'm using the information on Pocketsphinx (voice control), for example, right now in a separate project, and can say that it provides information much more concisely and effectively than online resources and addresses issues that are specific to implementation on a pi. For specific issues related to my project, I can still search out what I need online, but this book gives a great foundation. I highly recommend this book for those looking for a great overview of many of the current software and hardware tools that can be used on the raspberry pi and other GNU/Linux systems.

Al Swanson Nov 28, 2016

I was very excited to get this book based on the description. I did note there were very few reviews for the two earlier editions (especially given the huge numbers of pi's out there) but I know not everyone writes reviews and not everyone is going to use their Pi for robotics. I was also confident because, after all, this was the 3rd edition.The promise of the description is not kept in the content. The promise of using a Kinect for vision? Somehow the author felt that was kept in five pages. Do this, do this, do that. Almost nothing inn terms of explanation and certainly nothing in the way of troubleshooting. If it doesn't work with the instructions (in other words, if the code supplied that you type in) didn't work - don't expect ANY help.True, the description includes the fact that it's less than 200 pages. Even basic OpenCV books run multiple hundreds of pages with no robotics thrown in. So, bad on me.The other issue is that it's from Packt publishers. This company is just a small step above the Kindle Unlimited tech titles. Whether they are self publishers or just completely lacking in any sort of author assistance, I don't know. Some titles are excellent and often they are the only publisher offering books on recent tech subjects. But many titles are put out with little or no editing. Many are released with, like this one, false or (like here) misleading descriptions. Often the English is so poor as to make the book unusable. Poor translations might work for some subjects but not for tech.Not to mention the prices for Packt titles are usually absurdly high for what you get.I checked out the sample chapter on kindle for this book, but like all Packt books, that means you get the table of contents.In this case, I'm surprised because I've read some of the author's work and it's usually high quality. Not sure if this is for the bucks or was rushed, but no way does it fulfill the promise of the description. I'm very disappointed.

Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects: Work through a mix of amazing robotic projects using the Raspberry Pi Zero or the Raspberry Pi 3 , Third Edition

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