Building a Raspberry Pi Robot and Controlling it with Scratch Happy New Year everyone! Things have been a bit quiet on this blog due to the Christmas rush, and the fact that we’ve been spending time on product development (more on that in a future post). But here at last is the 3rd and final post in our series on the Raspberry Pi robot we […] Welcome to the second part of our series of posts, describing the workshop we ran at the recent Digimakers event at @Bristol. In the last post we described the outline of the workshop and looked at the hardware of the Raspberry Pi robot that we built for the event. Last weekend we ran a workshop at the Digimakers event at @Bristol where we taught people how to program a Raspberry Pi robot with the Scratch programming language. We had a great response to a recent blog post we wrote, describing how to build a Raspberry Pi robot that you can drive around using a tablet, smartphone or PC. A Raspberry Pi with a camera, gives you a small, low cost, embedded vision system, but it’s not very mobile.
Using a camera with Scratch on the Raspberry Pi | Matthew Venn I needed camera control with Scratch on the Raspberry Pi for a primary school aerial photography project. I added a new python extension for Simon’s ScratchGPIO that allows either the Raspberry Pi camera or a regular USB webcam to be used with Scratch. Follow Simon’s instructions for installing over on his site. Add your camera – if you’re using the Raspberry Pi camera, follow their instructions here. After you’ve started scratch, all you need is to make a broadcast block and set it’s message to ‘photo’. This program starts automatically, then in a loop flashes an LED on pin 8 and takes a photo. Photos are stored in /home/pi/photos, each photo has a number that increases as the photos are taken. Make sure you delete/backup your photos regularly or you’ll run out of space fairly fast!