About the Author
Richard Grimmett has always been fascinated by computers and electronics from his very first programming project that used FORTRAN on punch cards. He has a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Leadership Studies. He also has 26 years of experience in the Radar and Telecommunications industries and even has one of the original brick phones. He now teaches Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Brigham Young University-Idaho, where his office is filled with his many robotic projects. He has authored two books, BeagleBone Robotic Projects and Raspberry Pi Robotic Projects , for Packt Publishing.
I would certainly like to thank my wife, Jeanne, and my family for providing me with a wonderful, supportive environment that encourages me to take on projects like this one. I would also like to thank my students; they show me that amazing things can be accomplished by those who are unaware of all the barriers.
About the Reviewers
Jimmy Hedman is a professional high performance computing (HPC) geek who works with large systems where size is measured in number of racks and cores. In his spare time, he goes in the opposite direction and focuses on smaller things, such as BeagleBone Blacks and Arduinos. He is currently employed by South Pole AB, the biggest computer server manufacturer in Sweden, where he is a Linux consultant with HPC as his main focus. This is the first book Jimmy has worked on, but hopefully not the last.
I would like to thank my understanding wife who lets me go on with my hobbies like I do. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for letting me have this much fun with interesting stuff to read and review, and not to forget, Stockholm Robotfrening (Stockholm Robot Club), which opened my eyes to how easy it is to actually build a robot.
Pradumn Joshi is currently pursuing his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from NIT, Surat. He is an avid elocutionist, tinkerer, and debate enthusiast. He is also interested in economics, freelance writing, and western music. His area of technical interest lies in open source hardware development and embedded systems.
I would like to thank my best friends and brothers, Rahul and Parikshit.
Sudar Muthu builds robots as a hobby, and Arduino is his playground. He discovered the joy of hardware programming through Arduino around 4 years back, and since then, he has been using it for his various pet projects. He has created a lot of libraries for Arduino and also currently maintains a Makefile for Arduino that helps you do professional Arduino development.
He conducts workshops about Arduino and robotics and has given talks at various conferences about hardware programming. He blogs about his experience in hardware programming and also about his various projects at http://hardwarefun.com.
I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, who gave me life, to my wife, who made it happier, and to my son, Arul, who made it worth living.
Karan Thakkar is a hybrid mobile developer at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., with experience in a variety of enterprise projects based on cross-platform frameworks/libraries such as EnyoJS, Sencha Touch, Backbone.js, and PhoneGap. He graduated from Shivaji University with a degree in Electronics and Telecommunication. His blog can be found at http://karanjthakkar.wordpress.com/blog/. He has written a couple of interesting and highly viewed articles on OpenCV and Arduino. Being a robotics enthusiast, he rarely stops boasting about how he had the chance to tinker with the humanoid robot, Aldebaran Nao, during an internship.
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Preface
We live in a wonderful time where we have access to marvelous chunks of technology that inspire our creativity. The personal computer, smart phone, web camall of these make our lives easier, but more importantly, more creative. These new inventions invite us to not only become users, but also developers and creators, adding our own adaptions to the wide range of applications available.