PiCap Robot

@clementdidier


Materials

1 PiCap
1 RaspberryPi
1 L298M
4 motors and 1 chassis
1 battery pack for the motors
1 baterry for the RaspberryPi
1 tube of electric paint
cardboard, wires, crocodile clips

Step 1

Running Motors

Facilitating things, the PiCap allow us to access directly from the board to 7 digital I/O pins from Raspberry Pi GPIO, we are going to use pins 12, 13, 15, 16 to connect our motor driver. You can solder a male pin header to facilitate further manipulations.


The L298N is straightforward to use, and well documented. We must connect the 4 motors, the PiCap (IN1 IN2, IN3 IN4, GND) and the power supply or battery pack (+12V, GND).

Step 2

Electric paint sensors

Using masking tape and a paintbrush, we can make as many sensors as we want in any shape we want. In this case we are going to paint at least our four directions to control the robot.



We let it dry for a few minutes, remove the tape and then connect it to the PiCap with crocodile clips.





Step 3

Putting some software on it

What we want is to start the motors when the electric paint is touched and stop them when it is released. Code exemple is avaible here.

Step 4

Run it