New Software For Our Raspberry Pi Camera Robot

We had a great response to a recent blog post we wrote, describing how to build a Raspberry Pi robot that you can drive around using a tablet, smartphone or PC. Therefore we’ve carried on developing the software for it, and are pleased to announce the update today. The changes that we’ve made to the software have largely been to support cool things that we want to do with the robot in the future, but features that users of the robot will notice are

  • much faster camera streaming. Initially the camera was streaming images at about 4-5 frames per second using raspistill and mjpg-streamer, but we’ve now written our own camera streamer, and got it streaming at 15fps which is much smoother, and makes driving the robot around a lot easier.
  • support for more WiFi dongles when working as an access point. Our previous software release mainly worked with WiFi dongles that used the same chipset as the Edimax EW-7811Un (the hostapd rtl871xdrv driver). It was possible to get it to work with other WiFi dongles that used the hostapd nl80211 driver, but it required a fairly technical user. Now our software should work with a much wider range of WiFi dongles with no change required.
  • we’ve added a shutdown button. Previously the robot was turned off by just cutting off the power. This was very unlikely to corrupt the SD card as nothing was written to it, but a lot of users felt uncomfortable with not doing a proper shutdown. Now a shutdown button in the web interface provides peace of mind.
  • more configuration options. The configuration webpage of the robot has been expanded to offer more options to control the movement of the robot.

As before, there are multiple options for getting hold of this software. If you already have an SD card then you can download an SD card image with all of the software installed here (go for the most recent version). Update: If you use our SD card image, please remember to expand it after installation by running

sudo raspi-config

and choose the ‘Expand Filesystem’ option.

Alternatively, we sell SD cards with the image preloaded in our store. Finally, for those who want to set up the software from scratch, or who want to modify it for their own robotic projects, we give full details for building the SD card, and installing all the software, here.

We believe that the Raspberry Pi is a great platform for robotics, and have got a number of tutorials for our Raspberry Pi Camera bot lined up for the coming months. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see, please let us know.

 

5 thoughts on “New Software For Our Raspberry Pi Camera Robot

  1. dev

    Kept getting different hash values everytime i re-download the Zip image. Do you have any other alternate download sites? Or can you email me the file? Thanks.

    Reply
    1. Alan Post author

      Hi there,

      Sorry for the late reply. I think that there’s a problem with our file hosting at the moment which means that for some users the download never completes.

      Can you try downloading the image file using a download manager, or wget? This should hopefully allow you to get the file whilst we organise new hosting.

      Regards

      Alan

      Reply
  2. James martel

    Downloaded and installed “NEW SD” card image 7-18-2014. Using it with “NEW” Raspberry Pi Rev. B+ with a Raspberry Camera Noir. No issues were noted with connecting/detecting a Panda Wireless 150Mbps 2.4GHz Mid-range WiFi N USB Adapter No. PAU04 (B004AC0L4Y). I also have installed it’s companion Panda Wireless PBU20 Bluetooth 2.0 Adapter No. B00DW1STTS.
    I am using this with the Dawn Robotics 4 WD Robot Chassis and Dagu Mini-Driver and a Linksprite 3 axis Pan-n-Tilt Camera Kit, a Linksprite 12v to 5v Power Module, a Linksprite 12v Li-Ion Battery.

    I did notice that WiFi Config module is present on desktop but does not acquire/display “Networks or Adapter” information, also no Remote Desktop VNC support for those of us that want to remotely connect to the Robots’ desktop to perform updates as well as via “SSH”. (Not connected to Bluetooth keyboard or devices yet, Blue tooth connection drivers needed on desktop)

    Reply
    1. Alan Post author

      Cheers for the feedback James, nice to hear that things keep on working when the hardware is varied a bit.

      Would be cool to add in the VNC option for a future release. Is there a favourite one that you use and an installation/setup tutorial anywhere? The main thing I’d want to test is that CPU usage wasn’t increased too much if the VNC server wasn’t in use.

      Regards

      Alan

      Reply

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