Raspberry Car

A remote controlled car with a camera attached. Communication between opeator and car happens over the internet.

You might want to read the blog posts about this project. Start with: DIY World wide remote access to the Raspberry Car (Part 8).

This rewrite uses Nats.io for communication between car and operator since

• our Nats.io infrastructure is in place
• it comes with authentication

Tech Stack

• Nats.io for communication between car and client
  • Python client: nats-py
  • Rust client: nats
• Python on the car
  • Python Asyncio
• balenaCloud for deployment to the car
  • Raspberry-Car fleet
  • Device Setup
  • Environment config
  • Balena CLI
  • Bundling
  • WiFi Setup
  • balena-engine
  • Advanced boot settings
  • Raspberry PI boot settings
  • Balena Fleet Configuration
• Dev-Script-Runner for custom dev-tools
  • Bitwarden CLI
  • jq
  • ack
• Tauri for the client desktop app
  • Rust (for Tauri)
  • Typescript
  • SolidJS
  • Yarn
  • Vite
  • fnm

Development Setup

• run dev setup

Quick Start

You can work with the actual car or an emulated one.

1. (if working with real car) Place Raspberry Car in stand, such that wheel do not touch the ground.
2. (if working with real car) TODO: balena stuff
3. Now you can use the dev scripts.

• Code for the operator of the car resides in operator-app.
• Code for the car in car.

# local start
dev up_operator_app
dev up_car_emulator
dev fake_second_operator
…
dev down

# switch configuration profile
dev profile_local_activate           # Activates the configuration for a purely local development (default)
dev profile_sandstorm_nats_activate  # Activates the configuration using the prod Nats server for communication
dev profile_prod_activate            # Activates the production configuration using the real car with ID=1

# more commands
dev help

# enter Car
dev balena_enter # through cloud
ssh -p 22222 root@<ip> # through LAN

Technical background

The operator and car communicate voa Nats.io:

• server: nats://localhost:4222 for local dev, tls://natsv1.cloud.sandstorm.de:32222 for production
• topic: de.sandstorm.raspberry.car.ID with ID being the ID of the car

The operator sends commands to the car and the car sends its camera feed back.