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You're reading from  Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781839218804
Edition2nd Edition
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Danny Staple
Danny Staple
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Danny Staple

Danny Staple builds robots and gadgets as a hobbyist, makes videos about his work with robots, and attends community events such as PiWars and Arduino Day. He has been a professional Python programmer, later moving into DevOps, since 2009, and a software engineer since 2000. He has worked with embedded systems, including embedded Linux systems, throughout the majority of his career. He has been a mentor at a local CoderDojo, where he taught how to code with Python. He has run Lego Robotics clubs with Mindstorms. He has also developed Bounce!, a visual programming language targeted at teaching code using the NodeMCU IoT platform. The robots he has built with his children include TankBot, SkittleBot (now the Pi Wars robot), ArmBot, and SpiderBot.
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Exercises

This code is fun, but there are many ways you could improve the behaviors. Here are some suggested ways to extend this code and deepen your learning:

  • Use the control pipeline to allow a user to tune the color filters, correct radius, and PID values from the web page. Perhaps the initial PID values should be close to the other tunable values?
  • There is quite a lot of setup code. Could you put this into a function/method?
  • Could the queues to the web page be used to send the debug data to the page, instead of printing them in the console? Could the data be plotted in a graph?
  • The field of view for tracking with the Pi Camera is pretty narrow. A wide-angle lens would improve the field of view a lot, letting the robot see more.
  • The camera doesn't perform too well when it's dark. The robot has an LED strip, but it's not illuminating much. Could you add a bright LED as a headlamp for the camera?
  • You could track other objects by trying the...
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Learn Robotics Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Feb 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781839218804

Author (1)

author image
Danny Staple

Danny Staple builds robots and gadgets as a hobbyist, makes videos about his work with robots, and attends community events such as PiWars and Arduino Day. He has been a professional Python programmer, later moving into DevOps, since 2009, and a software engineer since 2000. He has worked with embedded systems, including embedded Linux systems, throughout the majority of his career. He has been a mentor at a local CoderDojo, where he taught how to code with Python. He has run Lego Robotics clubs with Mindstorms. He has also developed Bounce!, a visual programming language targeted at teaching code using the NodeMCU IoT platform. The robots he has built with his children include TankBot, SkittleBot (now the Pi Wars robot), ArmBot, and SpiderBot.
Read more about Danny Staple