Control the Boe-Bot with Raspberry Pi

thomas_pittin

Hello,

My question is, can I connect my Boe-Bot with the Raspberry Pi?

I want to program the Boe-Bot with the raspberry pi instead of the standard Pc

is it possible?

thanks in advance

Martin_H

Yes, there are several ways. How experienced are you with programming and electronics?

Electrically I believe the RaspberryPi is a 3.3 volt device, so you would need to use a level shifter to protect it from the Stamp's 5 v output. Here's an article on it: http://www.instructables.com/id/Pi-Cubed-How-to-connect-a-33V-Raspberry-Pi-to-a-5V/

What I would probably do is use one of the RaspberryPi's GPIO pins to send control signals to the Boe-bot. There are several serial slave clients written in PBasic which allow another computer to control it via a serial link. Bluetooth is often used to remotely control the Boe-bot. See: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/112822-How-to-%E2%80%93-Boe-Bot-Robot-with-Easy-Bluetooth-Module . But the RaspPi can send the signals the Bluetooth controller would send and the Boe-bot wouldn't know any difference. There's also the MS Robotics Studio client PBasic client that would work as well.

Bill Henning

Yes, you can...

Method 1:

Grab a copy of the Feb.2014 Servo magazine, read the "SPRITE" article - in it, I show a very simple, inexpensive method for interfacing to 5V digital I/O and servos.

Method 2: (far more powerful)

http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/robopi/

RoboPi adds a 100Mhz 8 core Propeller for doing the hard real time I/O with

- 24 digital I/O (5V safe, 3 pin servo style connector for each, each of which can be INPUT/OUTPUT/SERVO/PWM)
- 8 analog inputs (0-5V, 12 bits, 3 pin servo style connector for reach channel)
- easy C API for the Raspberry Pi to control RoboProp (similar to Wiring/Arduino)

If you go to the web page above, you can look at the documentation and API for RoboPi.

In both cases:

you can directly mount

http://www.mikronauts.com/proto/ezaspieproto300/

on a Boe-Bot (I've done this for some of my experiments)

and then you can just build the SPRITE circuit on it, or mount a Pi + RoboPi on it.

I'll take some photos of my Pi on one of my Boe-Bots later today and post it here.

thomas_pittin wrote: »

Hello,

My question is, can I connect my Boe-Bot with the Raspberry Pi?

I want to program the Boe-Bot with the raspberry pi instead of the standard Pc

is it possible?

thanks in advance

thomas_pittin

but, if I connect directly my boe-bot with micro USB to USB of my Raspberry, works it or not?

Martin_H

It might be possible. The Boe-bot has an FTDI chip that translates the serial signals to the USB protocol. The computer hosting the USB port needs to have an FTDI driver to create a serial port to talk to the Boe-bot. I don't know if the Linux distribution on the RaspPi includes one.

dgately

thomas_pittin wrote: »

but, if I connect directly my boe-bot with micro USB to USB of my Raspberry, works it or not?

There are other threads about using a RasberryPi to program a prop board using SimpleIDE.

Check out Parallax's page on SimpleIDE for Raspberry Pi: http://learn.parallax.com/propeller-c-set-simpleide/raspberrypi



dgately

Bill Henning

I am assuming you have the Basic Stamp based board that comes with the Boe-Bot kit.

Yes, you could connect it, however the Stamp software does not run on the Pi.

You would have to devise a serial protocol, that would send commands to the Boe-Bot from the Pi.

thomas_pittin wrote: »

but, if I connect directly my boe-bot with micro USB to USB of my Raspberry, works it or not?

NWCCTV

There's also the MS Robotics Studio client PBasic client that would work as well.

Where is this located?

Martin_H

NWCCTV wrote: »

Where is this located?

The file is called BoeBotControlForMsrsCtp2.bs2 and a Google search for it returns this link:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=3r54U7T8JJOkqAa55YKQAQ&url=http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php%3Fattachmentid%3D61366%26d%3D1244261652&cd=1&ved=0CCoQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNH1DGiBZVMGfw5mrBLSSBUQIvnViA&sig2=WBQTC1X2Z8yh05KKBeEo4w