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.

Last Saturday we attended the Linux User Pi Jam, in Poole, and had an absolute blast. The Jam was held at the RNLI college, which is a great location for an event, and we met some very interesting people at the Jam.

We’re glad to see that robotics is rising in popularity as something to do with your Pi. We ran a store at the Jam, and other robotics vendors there included The Little British Robot Company and PiBorg (with their very cool DoodleBorg tank). Ben from Phenoptix was also there with a neat little laser cut robot arm. We saw some cool Raspberry Pi robot projects from Leo White, and had a nice chat with Ian Renton, the guy behind the Raspberry Pi tank.

In the afternoon we gave a talk on combining the power of Arduino with the Pi to build Raspberry Pi robots as we have with our Camera Bot. For anybody interested the slides can be found here.

Pi Jams are a great way to meet interesting people, and get ideas for your next Pi project, if you haven’t been to one yet then we recommend that you keep an eye out for one in your area and head along.

A couple of months ago, Dawn Robotics went to the fantastic Cambridge Pi Jam organised by Michael Horne and Tim Richardson. Whilst there, I gave a talk on building a mobile robot with the Raspberry Pi (such as the camera robot we talk about in this blog post). The talk was aimed at quite a high level, and looked at 7 key areas you should think about when building a mobile robot.

Well, I recently found out that there was a video of the talk online (along with videos of all the other talks at the Jam). Therefore I thought that I’d link to it here, along with the slides for the talk. The sound quality is not too great, and I need to work on my presenting style, but hopefully it’ll be useful to people thinking of building their own robot. If you’ve got any questions, or would like more information on any of the areas talked about in the video, please post on our forums.

Also, for those that are in the area, we’ll also be giving a talk at the Linux User Raspberry Pi Jam being held in Poole this Saturday (5th April 2014). A small number of tickets for the Jam are still available here. This talk will mainly be about using the Pi with an Arduino, but we’ll still try to squeeze in some robots.