Welcome to the Raspberry Pi 2!

What is a Raspberry Pi?

“The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.

What’s more, the Raspberry Pi  has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been used in a wide array of digital maker projects, from music machines and parent detectors to weather stations and tweeting birdhouses with infra-red cameras.” Raspberry Pi

“The Raspberry Pi 2 is a bump in power and speed from the original. The newest version has the same I/O capabilities coupled with much more RAM and a dramatically faster CPU.” Information Week

You can learn all about the Raspberry Pi from: Raspberry Pi Foundation

Main Project

ROBOT

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Have you ever wanted a little robot by your side? Or have you ever wanted to create something of your own? In this journey, I will be documenting the creation of a robot using a Raspberry pi 2. 

Design

For the overall design of the robot, I knew I had to plan and draw out what I wanted the robot to look like. Consequently, I had to ask myself “what is going to be the purpose of my robot?” At first, I wanted to create something really elaborate and go over the top but as time went on, and since this was my first time creating a robot, I decided to go for a more simplistic approach. I decided to make my robot a sociable robot. My robot will have the ability to move around, light-up, take pictures, videos, detect motion, and communicate by speaking, hearing, and displaying text. After some time, I decided to go with a “Wall-E” look because he is one of my favorite robots. 

Movement

Wheels, Tracks, or Legs?
Considering I want my robot to look similar to Wall-E and be able to live a long life and go many places, I decided to use tracks. I know there are sociable robots that are stationary, but with people always on the go, I feel a robot should be too.

Building Material

I’m going to be building my robot from scratch and when building the robot, I have to consider the type of material I will build my robot with. There are many different options from metal to plastic to wood to composites. For my robot, I will be using plastic– mostly legos.

Connecting

For my Raspberry Pi 2, I connected it to the internet as well as connected to it from my laptop.

Security

In order to make the Raspberry Pi 2 a little more secure and strong, I installed Watchdog, which is a program that will automatically restart my Raspberry Pi 2 if it becomes unresponsive and UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), which will restrict access to my Raspberry Pi 2.

Breadboard Design

For the breadboard design, I used my prior knowledge of circuits to connect everything together such as the battery and LEDs. However, I also had to conduct new research because I had to work with new components such as the most important Raspberry Pi 2, as well as the DC motors, the microcontroller, and LCD screen. For my program, I used my prior knowledge of Python to develop the basics of the code and I had to conduct some research as to how exactly to implement all the components.

Software Development

Overall

Python
In making the programs, I decided to use Python since it was already on my Raspberry Pi 2 and I had knowledge of the language.
I originally thought that I would need 5 separate programs and I could combine the 5 programs into one big one later:

• A motor control program
• An LCD control program
• An LED control program
• A voice command/speaking/audio program
• A motion detection program

After doing some research, I found that I could do just 3 programs because for the motion detection, I could use software called “guvcview” and “motion” with my webcams, I could combine the LED control and motor control into 1, and I could use PiFm and a music player client for the sound playing. However, with limited time, I decided to save the voice command/audio program for a later date. I just started a little  part of it. Mostly, I created a program for motor/LED control and LCD control.

“Eyes of the Robot”

For my RoboPi2, I used 2 gigaware webcams with built-in microphones to give it the ability to not only “see” but “hear” as well.