Raspberry Pi Controlled Car : First Milestone

Hello folks,

I finally took the time to setup the car chassis which I got from China.  When I opened the package a while ago I immediately saw a bad surprise and that was the fact that I did not receive all correct pieces.  The 2 blades for the chassis are identical and that should not have been the case because first blade was especially for attaching the DC motors and the second for pieces on top of the chassis.  I had to use my creativity to get around that.  Another point were the pieces for attaching the DC motors to the blade which were not all the correct ones.  Anyway.  I managed to get the chassis set up.

As a first step I wanted to get one wheel turning forward and backward using Raspberry Pi, L298N (motor controller) and DC-motor.  See the result here : Raspberry Pi Controlled Car  Next step is getting the second front wheel to turn but than I will have to make sure they work together to get my car driving and turning in a controlled way.

Needless to say I used Java and Pi4J to do this.  I have not yet pushed the sources to github but I will as soon as I cleanup the test application.

 

Jan

 

L298N

A while ago I talked about making a Raspberry Pi Controlled car.  Don’t worry.  I did not forget.  Actually, I started yesterday writing some code to get the DC motor running.  What I need to get this working from a functional point of view is a Motor Controller which is a L298N in this case and of course the Raspberry Pi whom who is the microcontroller.  I have put a wheel on the DC Motor to make more clear where I am going to.  I also need a powersupply (4 AA batteries in a parallel holder) connected to the Motor Controller.  After some time I finally got it to work.  Felt great to see the wheel turning in both directions.  All done with some simple instructions.  The most difficult thing was wiring everything up so to speak.  The programming effort was very limited, just a couple of lines to get this to work.  Very easy.  Just setting some pins low or high and done …  Far more easy than the I2C instructions.

Once I have cleaned up my code, I will put it on Github.

l298n

Jan

Look and feel changes

I continuously try to work on the look and feel of my blog.   I realize that this is not always an easy thing.  Generating great  content in a great look and feel.  I admit I am new to blogging and sometimes my choices might not be as promising as I want them to be.  A couple of days ago I did a change to the look and feel.  Today I added the possibility to like posts.  Feel free to use it.  Let me know when you like a post.  It will give me great feedback that will be used for future posts. I also appreciate comments on the different topics.  If you have questions, please post them.

Jan