jondurrant / robotsanta

RobotSanta

This is a face tracking Santa Head project for my YouTube channel. Built using a Raspberry PI 4 and Raspberry PI Pico.

Cloning

Please clone with the --recurse-submodules switch to include the libraries.

Pico - Firmware

This is dependent on three libraries:

• MicroROS - Allow Pico to see and communicate with ROS Nodes
• FreeRTOS Kernel - Allow multi threading tasks on Pico
• Eigen - Used to do some Robot maths

To build binary

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

RPI - High-level function

The Raspberry PI needs to be running MicroROS bridget to connect to the Pico. See the repo MicroROS or my video walkthrough on MicroROS

You will also need to install ROS Humble.

The py folder contains two python programms.

pose.py

This will instruct the head to move to a possition. It takes pitch and yaw as parameters in radians. (-PI/2 to PI/2).

facePan.py

This uses openCV to detect faces on a camera and instruct the Robot to turn towards that face.