Skip to content

aaronlerch/spi-car

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

20 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

Spi Car

(Get it? Raspberry Pi Spy Car)

A Raspberry Pi-driven RC car that my son (7) and daughter (9) and I are building.

Objective

A SIMPLE project that spans a gamut of concepts between programming and electronics, with a (hopefully) sweet payout at the end. This should be something we can accomplish in a moderate amount of time with limited resources and above all else, it should be SIMPLE. Did I mention SIMPLE?

High level idea

We want to install a battery-driven Raspberry Pi and camera onto an existing RC car and use the GPIO pins to control forward/reverse and left/right. The Pi should be discoverable without knowing the IP address ahead of time (assuming connected to the same router), and it should expose a realtime streaming video endpoint as well as a simple API to control the car.

At the start, the controller will be software running on a laptop, with plans to implement an iOS app to expose the video and simple controls.

Components & Software

Components

  • Raspberry Pi, including
    • Raspberry Pi camera board
    • Micro wifi dongle
    • Portable battery pack (TBD)
    • Camera mount (off-the-shelf possible, I'd like to 3D print a custom one -- so far TBD)
  • RC car - we bought a $20 car from Fry's, similar to this one: http://www.frys.com/product/7257233
  • Wiring between GPIO pins and car's circuit board

Software

  • GStreamer for streaming realtime h.264 video
  • Network discovery app (Python app, listens for broadcast UDP and responds with the Pi's IP address)
  • API app on the Pi (Python? C? Ruby? HTTP-based or TCP sockets?)

Questions

Does the API need to require a persistent connection? How else would we handle "drive forward" in a way that doesn't end up with the car forced into always driving forward (or only driving forward in short bursts). A web-based controller would be cool.

About

A Raspberry Pi-based RC car

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published