Car9AteMyPi

Assembled Robot Car
Assembled & Wired Robot Car

Inspiration

We wanted to experiment with hardware. Casey got a raspberrypi and robot kit and wanted to get it to follow us like a dog.

What it does

It turns on a light and moves the wheels on command

Recipe for success:

3 great teammates
2 bike rides
4 hands and knees searches for dropped nuts and screws
Loads of help from our MLH Coordinator (thank you Paul!)
A finite (but great) number of energy drinks
4 different ways of finding an IP address
2 package managers (over the course of 8 hours)
Countless Google searches
Believing in the vision

Challenges we ran into

RaspberryPi >:(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Remotely powered light and servos on robot
Facial recognition
Solid groundwork code for facial recognition following

We also...

Assembled a robot car with our bare hands (and a few screwdrivers)
Not snapping the RaspberryPi in half after hour 8 of not being able to install packages
Not burning a store-bought Pi (With wires. We imaged it)
Solid groundwork code for facial recognition following

What we learned

Fantastic 18650 batteries where to find them (and their chargers)
Two package managers is better than one (and also strictly necessary)
Privacy (in networks) creates the best (SSH) connections
Some pis serve better when cooled

In seriousness, I never expected to learn so much about electronics, operating systems, package management, and networking in 24 hours. One of my "aha" moments was plugging the raspberrypi into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and realizing a computer is just a small set of switches. So many concepts from my computer science coursework feel much more real to me now that we've had to run up against memory issues, overheating, reimaging an OS, and trying several types of network connection.