Raspberry Pi BuildHat based bots

[CheungsLegoCreation]

Hi all, 

I am starting a new thread here to document and report my process of building a new bot based on the Raspberry Pi BuildHat. Comments and suggestions are all welcome. At the moment my bot is build with the following H/W - 

• RPi 4b
• Buildhat
• Sensehat (for displaying a face and doing other measurements)
• A Rpi camera
• Raspberry Pi OS (debian buster, finished configuring the python libs for the hats and added remote access so I can deploy new python code to it)

At the moment the bot can only tilt its head up and down, but in the next few days I will start adding tank tread for movement and a front grabber. Just in case you are interested in see what it looks like, here are some pics - 

Bot with camera, build hat and sense hat

Bot with camera, buildhat and sensehat (side view)

Looking forward to hear your feedback / comments.

Have a good weekend!

/cheung 8)

[CheungsLegoCreation]

Hi all,

I am happy to introduce my first version of RPi 4 based mindstorms bot. 

The bot consists of a Rpi4b, Rpi4b camera, Rpi BuildHat, RPi SenseHat and a Mindstorms 51515 hub. 

The buildhat is mainly used as an interface to supply power to the Pi (2 x 18650) and is NOT used for driving the motors due to issues with its Python API. 

The pi runs a python based web server and exposes a web interface. This interface shows a live stream view of the camera and can be used to drive the bot. The SenseHat at the front displays message entered through the text control.

When a key is pressed on the web interface, a http request is sent to the web server and perform the corresponding action.  Commands are sent to the Mindstorms hub using PySerial via the hub's REPL interface. 

Future improvement include a nicer web interface (the one shown in the video is essentially a quick hack). A tilt-able camera head and a hand to pick stuff up. The current setup I have would allow me to connect up to 10 motors / LPF2 devices.

Questions / comments are welcome!

 

[CheungsLegoCreation]

Hi all,

I did some small updates to my bot over the past few weeks and the video below shows how the bot is looking now -

[media]

The bot's height has increased and I have added a extendable grabber and a tiltable camera.

Hopefully in a few weeks time I will be able add object detection / tracking to it. 

Take care and happy building!

/cheung

 

Edited January 31, 2022 by CheungsLegoCreation

[Gimmick]

I think that's super cool :o 

[Philipp_83]

Impressive bot! Any chance you could post the source code for the raspberry where it is sending commands to the hub? Thank you very much!

[CheungsLegoCreation]

On 1/31/2022 at 11:16 PM, Gimmick said:

I think that's super cool :o 

Thanks Gimmick. This is a work in progress and I am hoping the next change would allow it to pick up "golf ball" by doing object detection. It could take a few months to do it though since I am new to python and there are still lots for me to learn.

On 2/2/2022 at 2:43 AM, Philipp_83 said:

Impressive bot! Any chance you could post the source code for the raspberry where it is sending commands to the hub? Thank you very much!

Hi Philipp_83, my code is very messy at the moment and it's probably not in its best form for sharing. That being said my code was based on information from 

https://mobile.twitter.com/biglesp/status/1260872904771854336

It contains an example on how to use pyserial to connect to the technic hub from RPi.