Robot Ready for Rebelious action with Remote Control...finally.

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves." - Marie Curie

This week has been a busy and frustrating week for robotics club.

First of all, we were looking into a way of moving the Camjam robots using the package 'RPi.GPIO' instead of 'gpiozero'. This was much more complicated than it should've been as it took me(Alistair) several hours to realise the reason the code wasn't working the way it should've was because of a python script using gpiozero in the background was conflicting with the code I was trying to run.

The following day, we were trying to install packages for a remote control script but they just wouldn't install. We got error messages saying  "externally managed envoirment" and "Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully." Luckily with hours of constantly trying and with help from chalfront chubby, Colin Walls, Colin Grant, Mike Horne and Keegan on the Pi Wars discord server, we finally discovered that it was the OS that was the problem. I was using the bookworm OS which did not like me installing the packages the way I was. Instead I switched to the Legacy OS and it worked with no problem. The micro SD card was all ready to bring to the club so that we could get a robot moving with remote control.

however...

We got the robot to move for 1 test. We then had a look at getting the robot to run the remote control script off boot. We tried to run it again however smoke started coming out of the Rasberry Pi! We are not 100% sure but we think that one of the wires got detatched from the motor controller. This caused one of the wheels to stop working.

The next day we tried to run the same script on one of our other Camjams and it worked. Although it worked, we noticed a few issues. The controller inputs was the inverse of what the robot did(e.g. pushing the joystick forward would move the robot backwards.) We also noticed that the battery pack was too heavy for the robot and influenced the way it moved. We will look on fixing these issues by reversing the motor directions and getting a more light weight battery pack.