robot

In my evolving robot car project it is now time to go for a test drive. More precisely, I would like to establish bidirectional communication between the Raspberry Pi, acting as spiritus rector, and the Arduino, translating abstract intention into concrete motor control with the Adafruit Motor Shield.

For a quite some time I had planned to build my own small mobile robot. During the last weeks I ordered the components and played a little bit with an Arduino and ultrasonic distance sensors (as described in an earlier post). Now I have finally found the time to put the basic setup in place and go for a first test drive. Before getting lost in potentially boring details, let’s look at a video of the first test drive (turning on the spot). Note that the Raspberry is acting as video streaming server (see here for documentation) so that the live transmission of this noteworthy event can be seen on the notebook in the back:

In this project I am interfacing the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor module to a Raspberry Pi to measure distance. Later on the Raspberry as well as the sensor will be part of an obstacle avoiding robot. I use my oscilloscope to check whether the sensor is working as announced.