Discord Video Car

• 

  the car almost put together

• 

  trevor drilling into a popsicle stick

Inspiration

The entertainment of dozens of people sending commands to a robot, trying to get it to move around successfully

What it does

Users in a discord server can see a livestream of the area in front of the the car. They can type !forward to make the car move forward and !back to make the car move backwards

How I built it

We used a raspberry pi to control the motors and camera using Python

Challenges I ran into

Wasted a huge amount of time just getting into our raspberry pi because we didn't have a monitor and it was hard to find the pi on the network with dozens of other people.

We also spent a huge amount of time soldering a complicated h bridge circuit which turned out to be completely useless.

We also spent a long time trying to figure out how the motors worked but it turned out they were just weird because we were testing with a faulty Arduino

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The car body is pretty nice despite it being made of popsicle sticks

What I learned

you can't just flip an N type transistor to make a P type, logging into a raspberry pi is really hard when you don't have a monitor, how to do GPIO and PWM in Python on Raspberry Pi, how a hackathon works

What's next for Discord Video Car

Need to add more freedom of movement (multiple speeds, better turning), get rid of the ethernet cable (replace it with wifi), run the car off batteries instead of a plug, a more user friendly/nicer discord interface, ultrasonics to avoid hitting walls

Built With

• discord
• python
• raspberry-pi