Learning the Lingo

Owning a Raspberry Pi automatically earns you a place in a huge, vibrant, buzzing community that's forever growing and creating. The grand master Eben Upton, co-inventor and founder of the RPi and the Raspberry Pi foundation, has created something that can instil wonder and awe, as well as excitement and curiosity from the moment a Pi is placed into your hands. His wife, Liz, runs the Raspberry Pi website; quite possibly the only blog on the internet to be updated multiple times a day by the same writer! It's fantastic!

The forums are filled with endless streams of questions and answers on the most obvious of queries, to the tiniest troubleshooting problems. And EVERYONE is so friendly. I plucked up the courage to ask about building a robot vehicle, for complete novices, and was greeted with a reply practically the next day. It's really helped me with researching hardware for my robot.

It has also spurred my interest in and awareness of what people are doing in their free time. The country is filled with hacker communities working on big, ambitious projects, as well as parent-child teams spending their evenings together fiddling around and inventing wonderfully simple but oh-so-cool applications for the Pi.

I can't believe I didn't get involved sooner! I've missed so much and now I'm abso-blooming-lutely buzzing for my robot adventures. Smiley-face emoticon is required, me-thinks. :D

Anyhoo, the purpose of this post was to record a bit of terminology I've picked up over the past few weeks. It's kind of ESSENTIAL if you want to understand some of the convos on raspberrypi.org! These definitions are from motoman.com, my new dictionary-go-to:

Closed-Loop : Control achieved by a robot manipulator by means of feed-back information. As a manipulator is in action, it's sensors continually feed-back information to the robot's controller which are used to further guide the manipulator within the given task. Many sensors are used to feed-back information about the manipulator's placement, speed, torque, applied forces, as well as the placement of a targeted moving object, etc.

Compliant Robot: A robot that performs tasks, with respect to external forces, by modifying its motions in a manner that minimizes those forces. The indicated or allowed motion is accomplished through lateral (horizontal), axial (vertical) or rotational compliance.

Controller System: The robot control mechanism is usually a computer of some type (THE RPI), which is used to store data (both robot and work environment), and store and execute programs, which operate the robot. The controller system contains the programs, data, algorithms; logic analysis, and various other processing activities, which enable it to perform.

CPU (Central Processing Unit) : The main circuit board and processor of the Controller System.

Encoder: A feedback device in the robot manipulator arm that provides current position (and orientation of the arm) data to the controller. A beam of light passes through a rotating code disk that contains a precise pattern of opaque and transparent segments on its surface. Light that is transmitted through the disk strikes photo-detectors, which convert the light pattern to electrical signals.

Feedback Sensor: A mechanism through which information from sensing devices is fed back to the robot's control unit. The information is utilized in the subsequent direction of the robot's motion.

Robot Programming Language: An interface between a human user and a robot, which relates humans commands to the robot.

Servo-System: A system in which the controller issues commands to the motors, the motors drive the arm, and an encoder sensor measures the motor rotary motions and signals the amount of the motion back to the controller. This process is continued many times per second until the arm is repositioned to the point requested.

There is so much more, but this is just a taste of the lingo I promise myself I will learn, so that I can use it in my EPQ project and sound really awesome and fancy. Obviously, there is immense educational benefit to learning this but there is a small superficial motive as well...!

Sites used: http://www.motoman.co.uk/