Category: Robotics

Raspberry Pi Car

Tim Stableford

I’ve recently found time to work on my Pi Car and it is now in a mostly working state with one thing I haven’t quite found yet.

It now has a webcam mounted on it and acts as a wireless access point with DHCP server. I went down this route for portability. This meant that I could easily create an Android App that controlled the movement of the car. This currently looks very similar to the application for my Bluetooth car (seen here) except that it runs on Android and connects over Wifi.

An outside view of my Pi Car with mounted webcam
An outside view of my Pi Car with mounted webcam

As you can see from the picture above the car now has a webcam mounted to it’s top, this is currently streamed to a laptop using ffmpeg but I have future plans to stream to the Android App.

The Raspberry Pi primarily acts as a Wifi shield for an Arduino in the car which interfaces with the motors, as well as streaming the webcam.

This shows the inside of the car, the board in the center is a Raspberry Pi, the one in the cabin of the car the wifi.
This shows the inside of the car, the board in the center is a Raspberry Pi, the one in the cabin of the car the Wifi.

 

Bluetooth RC Car

Tim Stableford

A project that I’ve been playing around with for a while now that has just been replaced is my Bluetooth RC Car project.

Bluetooth RC Car
A picture showing the rear end of the car

This car was hacked together mostly from whatever scraps I could get hold of, such as the servo, distance sensor, and chassis. At the heart of the project is an Arduino, this is connected to the controlling device such as my PDA, which has an application coded to C#.

Bluetooth Car C# Control Program
The Bluetooth Car Control software running on a PPC2003SE simulator

(Source Code [Visual Studio 2005 Project] http://tstableford.co.uk/downloads/bt_car_control.zip)

This allows me to control basic movement by dragging round the red circle, toggle the forward lights (the reverse ones come on automatically), manually change the servos position which the distance sensor is mounted to, or set it into auto mode.
Auto mode is a basic obstacle avoidance system, it drives forward fairly slowly while the servo scans 45 degrees to the left and right of the center while gathering distance measurements from the ultrasonic distance sensor. If it detects an object within 1 meter of the sensor it decides whether to turn left or right dependent on the servos location.

Bluetooth RC Car

(Arduino Source-code http://users.aber.ac.uk/tis4/downloads/rc_car_control.zip)

I think this project has come to an end now, because the limited size there’s little else I can do. So I’ve started a new car that has a much larger chassis and battery pack, it has a real servo to control the steering, rather than a motor as pictured above it also has a Raspberry Pi, Wifi, and soon a webcam mounted on servos.