Weaponizing our Robot - Robotics with Python Raspberry Pi and GoPiGo p.5

Key Takeaways

What's going on everybody? Welcome to part five of our robotics with the Raspberry Pi tutorial video series. In this part, we're going to be talking about how we can control that USB cannon. Now, uh if you don't have the Canon, you want to get one, I'll put a link to it in the description so you can check that out. Otherwise, let's get to it. So, first of all, uh there is some sample code uh that came with the GoP to work with the Canon. You'll need you would need a uh USB mouse connected to the Go Pi or the Raspberry Pi itself in order to make it work. But instead, I'd like to do this and be able to control that cannon remotely. And then eventually we we just want to be able to get comfortable with it so that we can write code and logic that can control this cannon all on its own. So first of all, let's check out the code uh that that came from Go basically. So we can go to homepi and then go into gopy go software python examples and then we're looking for the office cannon. So we'll double click there and here's office cannon v1.py. So let's go ahead and open that up. And in here we can see that we've got all these imports. Most of these basically all these you should have besides the USB uh stuff. So, uh, just for the record, I think if you get this from if you get the card from GoP, uh, you will already have PI USB. Otherwise, you're going to want to come over here and if you haven't already done pseudoapp get update update and then go ahead and do pseudoapp get uh, install python-pip. And then once you've done that and you have uh pip do pip install pi USB, install all that and you should be all set. So now we have the uh code here. And what we're going to go ahead and do is basically we'll take this and copy that and then come all the way down here and we'll at least copy down to here. We'll copy that. Let me set this aside for now. Um, actually we might have to recopy that. But, uh, go over to homepi desktop goal. And I'm going to go ahead and rightclick here, duplicate. And I'm going to duplicate this to tutorial 5.py. And then I'm going to open that up. And then we've got our key input here. I'm going to do enter enter. Just a few enters here. And let's uh come back over to the original script here from Office Cannon. Rightclick, copy, and then we'll just paste all that in there. Uh now, control. We don't really need uh well, we're going to leave that there for now. And then coming down here, we can see there's some basic code here. Uh and this is we basically want all of this for sure. So, we'll take that and we're going to go ahead and copy that starting code and we're going to come over here above the command stuff and we'll paste and then highlight that block of code and then do control open square brackets two times. Get that to come on over. Now, uh we have the basic setup here. Um I'm trying to think of anything will cause problems. I believe probably the only thing that'll cause us trouble at the moment is going to be maybe time delay, but we should be all set. So, I'm going to go ahead and move this over. And now what we want to do is we want to add controls for the actual um for key input here. So, we've got all this stuff here, and this is to control the Pi. But now, we've got this stuff for the missile launcher. So now we want to add in some controls for the missiles. So let me make the size a little bigger. And I'm going to pull this up. And so we're within the key input function. So coming on down after our definition basically of the let me do this um of what we're going to do with the servo. Let's make some [Music] space. And what we're going to add here is first of all the fire. So we're going to ask uh we'll use the control buttons for fire since space is occupied as stop. So we're going to say uh l if key press double equals control_r or key press equals uh control l. If either of those is the case, then we want to we'll go ahead and print fire rockets. And uh just moving I'm you don't have to bring yours over, but um let me do control F rockets. There we go. So to fire the rockets, just looking at the code for the office cannon that we took. Uh this is basically because we were you can use your mouse to do it, but we're not going to worry about that. Uh, so the command to actually fire the rockets is uh run command fire and then t delay, which I'm not sure this we're probably not going to have that, but we'll go ahead and copy that. Come down here and then bam. Run command fire and then t delay. So now we're going to check out run command. Um, and in fact, let's go ahead and uh let's global t delay here. And actually, let's see where is Let's find the time delay. Anyway, um figure out. Yeah. So, it it's right here. Uh let's go ahead and just actually let's take this cut and let's just put that at the very top of our script. I'm just going to paste it here. Okay. So, put time delay there. If you if you couldn't find it, just search for t delay. Uh and you just you're looking for when it's actually defined. Um, so mine's here, but you'll you can find it and it'll actually be in one of your functions there. So just take that and put it to the top. That way you can reference time delay uh in the rest of your script. So then coming down here. So that was to fire and we're we're saying the fire is going to be with one of your control keys. Now what we want to do is actually be able to control because the the missile launcher itself is on a sort of turret. So what we're going to do is we're going to define all the controls for like moving the turret around. So, for example, we can do that with our arrow keys. So, we're going to say l if key press equals uh left. What we're going to do is we'll just print out left rockets. And then we do run command. And the command we want to run is left for the rockets. And then we want to delay it with time delay. Okay. And now we're going to go ahead and copy that and paste it three more times for the other controls. So copy, paste, paste, paste. So we've got left, right, right, and right. And then we're going to have up, up, up, and then down, down, and down. So then these are the commands that we'll hopefully be able to pass to our uh missile launcher with the on the turret there. So let's go ahead and save that. So that's tutorial five. And we'll bring over our remote desktop here. We'll open up the terminal. And let me make that terminal full size for everybody. And then we're going to navigate to uh where we're writing the script which is cd into desktop. I'm in go pi go local and you see tutorial 5. So now pseudo python tutorial 5.py. We'll go ahead and run that. And it takes a little bit to first set up, but you can see that it's running that initial code there to move the turret at least. And we know it's set once this TK win window comes up. So the reason why I just moved just then is that initial setup here. So that sets up the USB there. We run this code and then we run this command zero and then 100 there. Interesting. Skype is hacking me apparently. So anyway, run command 0 100 and then we're stopping and and like waiting for more commands. So that's just that's built in. that was part of the uh go pi go. So we can literally check for zero here, right? So run command zero. Basically all this does is moves our cannon down and to the left by this much. So um just keep that in mind. Now uh I'll save that. But we should be able to run now. So first we'll check forward. Okay, stop. Backwards stop. And now we can test our arrow keys to hopefully move our missile launcher left. We'd already moved all the way left, so now we're moving it right. No problem. We can move it up, down. Awesome. Move it around. And then now we'll try control to actually fire the cannon itself. Sure enough, I just shot myself. Awesome. Hit me right in the back. All right. So, uh, now we're able to actually control our robot with our keys. And what's nice about that is now that we can control it with our keys, that also means that we can actually start to build Python logic to start to control our uh, go and then eventually we can make it fully autonomous and then we can make it shoot stuff based on logic and we don't even have to do anything. So, um, hopefully you guys got to that point. the uh USB missile launcher. I think it's just super cool. I realized it was $45, but uh the cool factor is just so high for me. And I love how you can move it up, down, left, and left and right. And probably what I'll end up doing is maybe even taping or something the uh Raspberry Pi camera module to the uh missile launcher to actually see where we're going to fire. Uh the distance sensor we may leave it on, but it would also be nice to have the distance sensor on the missile launcher because then you can actually do the calculation of how far is the target and then we can kind of move the turret up to account for, you know, making that distance, but that'd be really complex. We'll probably keep it a little more simple than that. We're already going to try to do image recognition with Open CV, so we might avoid doing that. But anyway, pretty cool. I love the little cannon. I love that you can like shoot it and it actually shoots pretty far. I mean, this this will actually get across my room if I fire this. I mean, that goes all the way across my room. My room's not huge or anything, but pretty cool. So, anyways, if you guys have any questions or comments up to this point, please feel free to leave them below. Otherwise, as always, thanks for watching. Thanks for all the support and subscriptions, and until next time. Oh, and I forgot to mention uh how I actually mounted the missile launcher on there. Really simple. I just used uh some tape and made it double-sided tape, stuck it on there, and that works good enough. So, anybody who is curious how I did that, that's literally all I did. You could glue it on there if you really wanted it to stay, but I didn't. I just used painters tape, honestly, and made a little loop, stuck it on there, and uh that was more than enough to keep that thing steady. So anyway, figured people might be curious how it actually got on there. Anyway, till next time.