I think everyone builds one of these little camera cars at least once.
I made one when I got my NTC CHIP[0] in 2015. This was a pretty big deal at the time because Raspberry Pi were still months away from releasing a model with integrated WiFi, and were sold out for quite a while after that. You had to use USB WiFi adapters, and this was always a little flakey.
I attached my camera to a servo so you could tilt it up and down, and it even had a rear facing camera and a magnetic connector, so you could back up and 'dock' with a power supply to recharge. I wanted to make a little claw arm for it, but I never got that far. Good times, makes me want to do another one.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)
I want to learn more about your definition of “everyone”.
An automatic charging dock and a robotic arm could be my next challenge. Really cool build
The picture of a little car kit loaded with a breadboard, a mountain of wires, and an added camera in the front was delightful. Now that's the hacker spirit! Thanks for the article, it's a joy to read.
Thank you for the kind words, glad you liked it!
How much does one of them go for?
You can get them for about 2000 euros in Europe. Variation in prices are mostly due to shipping from China.
Some time ago I was looking for a chassis like that one, minus the lawnmower hardware, to build something that could "patrol" around my home, which has some irregular terrain that would probably have anything with non huge wheels flip over or get stuck. All I could find are interesting metal robot chassis on Aliexpress which were however way overpriced considering the much smaller size and crappy plastic tracks.
Thinking through the stated use case makes me think a small drone that would undock, scan your house, send you the video, and redock on request would be a useful project/product. Great peace of mind without a full stationary security camera system.
Yeah that’s about as mobile as a camera can get. I’d try it if it didn’t scare the cat.
What a wonderful journey back to computing! The Raspberry Pi is such a perfect platform for rekindling that curiosity and hands-on exploration. There's something special about being able to physically tinker with hardware while learning programming. Your excitement really comes through in this post!
I've built something like this using the ESP32-CAM if you want lower power usage. Although the real power usage is in the motors anyway.
It's awesome when it finally works and you can drive it around at a distance though!
Yeah, Arduino, Teensy, ESP32… I prefer these options when you don't in fact need an OS.
Less OS means less to go wrong. (Just waiting for a Pi to boot vs. a Teensy is reason enough to go with the more stripped-down hardware.)
I agree, it definitely felt a bit spoiled using a full computer for a toy like this, but the main goal for me was learning something new.
No, that's cool. I didn't mean to come across as critical.
Love to see the Pi getting some rather creative use! The most use I got out of one was as a health check endpoint for power in my garage which was holding frozen milk for my newborn, but the circuit kept tripping. Had another server email me if it couldn't reach the Pi for some reason. Just used some real simple Go code. It was not production but it worked. Not everything needs to change the world, maybe just make your day easier.
Exactly. When it helps your daily life, the whole build process is way more exciting. I really liked your project as well.
> There may be a better way but it’s a simple way to expose a camera feed without requiring heavy libraries.
is ffmpeg considered heavy? can pipe rpicam into ffmpeg to get an SRT stream
> Did we feed the cat?
> Is the cat okay?
The cat is going to love this new toy
it’s a love–hate relationship for now.
..and for his next trick, adding a servo is easy. Pigpio provides services underneath the operating system including square wave generators. Power the servo at 7.2 volts and drive the signal directly off a gpio pin at 5 volts!
using an entire computer to generate a PWM, hooray!
Great idea, blog post #2 will definitely be about this.
This is car is so cute. I love it!
great article and I'm a fan of the chat style about section. kudos!
Thank you for your kind words! I don’t come from a particularly special background, so I tried to create something interesting and eye-catching to stand out.