Made a new friend

Great fun to build

Spent a happy few hours over the weekend building one of these. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 (I needed to get the one with 4G). it works very well. There’s an iPhone app that you can use to control it remotely. The default configuration has the robot setting up an access point you connect your phone to before you run the app. Then you can steer the robot around viewing the world through its onboard camera. You can also have the robot pick up and recognise the red, green and blue blocks that come with the kit.

I thought that it would be powered by the Robot Operating System but it turns out that everything is controlled by some well written Python code that controls the motors directly. The vision system uses OpenCV to find coloured bricks and perform line following. It would be quite easy to modify this code and make the robot perform new tasks. There is also a program you can use to record robot arm positions and create behaviours.

There were a couple of tricky parts to the construction. The first was downloading the software itself. The links are on a card which comes with the robot. Find a way to open these on your desktop computer (they are given as QR codes) and you’ll be sent to a Google Drive folder which contains the stuff you want. There are also links to videos which you must watch before you build anything. The second tricky bit was attaching the arm servo cables to the little Raspberry Pi hat that connects to everything. You are just pushing sockets onto the pins, but one of the sockets (the one for the fan) has some alignment fins on the side that get in the way. One fix would be to chop the fins off, but I opted for slightly bending the pins to make room.

My robot worked second time (I’d not connected one of the robot arm servos properly) and was great fun to drive round. If you want the vision system to recognise the coloured blocks properly you will need to make sure the surroundings aren’t too confusing.

If you want a powerful and robust little platform I can strongly recommend it. One tip: You’ll need some rechargeable batteries for it and these are not in the kit. I got myself a flashlight, charger and some batteries in rather a nice kit I found here.