If you’re looking for a board to make your project go, the Raspberry Pi Pico W is a fine choice. In fact, maker and developer Paulsb liked it so much he decided to use it twice in his latest project. Using two Raspberry Pi Pico W, he’s developed a custom RC car and a controller that operates the vehicle wirelessly.
According to Paulsb, the RC car has two distinct driving modes. The first one allows you to control the cars movements. This can be done using either the custom controller or using the UDP Joystick phone app. The second mode is avoidance mode in which case the car is able to self navigate while avoiding obstacles. Using the phone app instead of the controller won’t allow you to switch between avoidance and control mode, however.
Paulsb went on to explain some of the design choices in the build. Most notably, the controller uses a Pico W as the main board but he also had to an an ADS1115 ADC board as the Pico W only has three analog channels. The ADS1115 adds an additional four ADC channels to the Pico W controller.
The robot car is also driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico W. The frame for the car comes from an EMO Smart Robot Car Chassis Kit with motors. An L298N motor driver controller board was included to help drive the servos. An HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor is mounted on the front resembling a pair of eyes. This is used to help navigate in avoidance mode. A few 3D-printed assets were developed just for the project as well and can be found on the project page at Hackster.
The software for the project was written using C++ using the Arduino IDE. You can find more details about the project source code over at Hackster. The project has been made open source so anyone is welcome to peruse the source code to recreate the build themselves or modify it for a similar creation.
If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the project page over at Hackster and be sure to follow Paulsb for more cool developments as well as any future updates on this one.
