SunFounder Smart Video Robot Car Kit for Raspberry Pi

Updates on Nov 21, 2021Short review: I am very pleased with this little car. Everything works as expected - it will be fun to dig into the code and start making changes and updates. Only one or two minor suggestions to get everything working.Assembling the car takes some time (probably about an hour). The directions for assembly seem clear and straightforward; I had no trouble following these directions. In addition, there are extra screws, bolts, nuts, and wires provided, so if you happen to drop one of the small screws or pieces, there are backups.Let me also say how nice it was to have a magnetic screwdriver provided as part of the kit. Some of the screw holes are hard to get to, and being able to have the screw stuck to the screwdriver as you try to line pieces up to fit it into place made the entire assembly process much easier.About halfway through the assembly, though, you are to plug in the servos and zero them. It is not clear, but this program is contained in the picar-x/examples folder on the raspberry pi – after you download and get things set up. Make sure to run it before continuing with the build, it will make a lot of things easier. The instructions on the paper weren’t clear on this, so I didn’t zero things until after the car was assembled. It was still possible to do, but not as simple.On completing the car, I set up the pi. Downloading the Rpi OS takes a while (depending on your connection speed, I guess). I did a new install of the most recent OS to try to prevent any problems. I then downloaded the picar-x software from Sunfounder. The first download did not succeed, so I removed everything and tried again. The second download was successful; there was no indication that any libraries or anything else were not installed.I connected to the car through putty and was able to run through the first two or three programs. The car did move as it was supposed to, and the obstacle avoidance was able to detect an obstacle. My car did not drive straight (zeroing the servo and trying to reconnect the axle is a bit tedious...)Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to get the computer vision programs to work. On trying to run the code, I received an error message. I am still trying to track down the reason for it and determine if it is a hardware or software issue.UPDATE: The computer vision is now working - for some reason I was having trouble getting things to run through remote desktop, but everything works fine using VNC. All the example programs run. Be sure to go to the picar-x/examples folder in the pi to find them (this isn't really clear in the online documentation).The online documentation contains a nice explanation of the code but doesn't tell you which programs to run (though it isn't really difficult to figure out).Other than this one small caveat, it is a very nicely put together piece of equipment. I like the code explanations, which gives a jumping-off point for exploring more of the code on your own. You could easily begin to update it to make self-driving...Enjoy playing with your new car.Thanks for reading – I hope this was helpful.

Overall: Five star recommendation for this neat and innovative idea in Raspberry Pi kits. This kit is a great introduction to the many great uses of the Pi, and shows the practical uses of a couple of the commonly available sensors on the market. The interface and kit are laid out well and have easy to follow instructions. The set includes a wide variety of demonstration projects to exercise the various sensors and to show how a more complex program might be written. The included programs show off the wide capability of the car quite nicely, demonstrating the automated facial recognition, color detection, line following and more.Each of the projects has a corresponding Python project to show the more advanced experimenter how to run it. Saving your programs requires an account on Sunfounder’s project server for Ezblock.Needed to use: You’ll need two 18650 4.7V batteries and a Raspberry Pi to use the kit. I also found that I needed a tablet, as I couldn’t get the interface to work on my phone.Pros:The kit is very complete, all parts are separately packaged and many spares of easily dropped or fragile connections are included.They include a screwdriver and wrench for the fasteners that are nice enough to keep for future projects.The kit is, except the Pi and batteries, extremely complete and well documented.The website for the car is a quite thorough guide to the use cases for the various projects and setup of the kit. The documentation is some of the best I’ve seen for a kit like this.The EzBlock language is an interface to a customized version of Blockly, a complete graphic programming language that allows for very complex projects to be prototyped with no conventional programming used. It’s a great interface.The included projects and how to guide are very well thought out, and showcase the variety of sensors with practical simulations and demonstrations that can easily be extended.All of Sunfounder’s interface libraries can be found on their GitHub site. They have extensive documentation for the more advanced experiementor there.Cons:I feel like the packaging could be more clear about what you need to get the car to work. The batteries are not a common thing for many people. Pi not included could also be added. It’s clear from the description on Amazon, but I feel like it should be mentioned more explicitly.I found the software unusable without using a tablet. It functioned fine on my iPhone, but you couldn’t get to the buttons correctly navigate the screens to use it. It worked great on a tablet. You really want a tablet to be able to see the video well anyway.I think that although the documentation is very good, it’s not clear how to transition from experimenting with the car to running the programs on the car autonomously.This is a great kit for just about any level of electronic experimenter to delve into Raspberry Pi automation and sensors used in a practical sense. With the extensive documentation, the time from completion of assembly to use of the car is about five minutes. The auto calibration and setup is well thought out, and will get you up and running in no time. I’ve had a lot of fun putting it through it’s paces.