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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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Choosing the parts

Throughout this book, we have looked at the tradeoffs between different kinds of sensors, different chassis kits, controllers, and so on. These are tradeoffs on weight, complexity, availability (you don't want an irreplaceable part), and cost, covered in detail in Chapter 6, Building Robot Basics – Wheels, Power, and Wiring.

If a particular kit inspired the robot—for example, SpiderBot was inspired by a hexapod kit; yours could be a robot arm or caterpillar track kit—this will likely constrain the other part choices you need to make. I'd need to support 18 servo motors; however, I had a 16-motor controller available, so I elected to use two input/output (I/O) pins of the central controller for the remaining two servos. This added software complexity, though.

Another tradeoff was the main controller. I knew that I'd want SpiderBot to be Wi-Fi-enabled, but it wasn't going to be doing visual processing, so a small, cheap...

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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