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DonkeyCar: Raspberry Pi Controlled Robot Car


Last summer, I worked with students at Waupaca Middle School to create robotic cars. We started building from instructions from donkeycar.com, to build cars powered by Raspberry Pi computers.



This process was technical, but my students did much of the heavy lifting. I created the disk images for the students, and my 3d printer was printing some of the largest parts ahead of time for our two week course. We were successful in creating drivable cars, within a week! 

Here is a list of what the students did:

  • Disassemble necessary parts of the car
  • Assembly.
  • Mounting battery.
  • Finding the codes for calibrating the cars.
  • 3d printing parts.
  • programing in their codes, 
  • launching the driving website.
  • designing a road course for the cars.
  • connecting a tablet to drive their car.
  • driving the cars.
  • and learning to fix the cars... when they didn't work so well.

Here is the process that we followed.




We have more work to do... but the platform has options to expand.  Looking in the future to work on the autonomous driving programming. Also it would be great to find a more permanent course for our cars. I would love to have a bit of a community of other drivers that want to come together work!
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