Webcam on wheels

We have been waiting for the last parts to arrive for our rover aka webcam on wheels project. When they were delivered on Tuesday I already knew Ellis and I were having a day off from school and work two days later. The perfect time to put it all together. The housing and wheels and gears had already been 3D printed before. Today we installed motors, a motor control unit, a Raspberry Pi zero for “brains”, a tiny camera and a servo to turn the camera up and down. A power bank provides the juice and with that our rover came to life! It is connected to our home network through the Zero’s WiFi connection and it can be controlled from a computer. On the computer screen, you see the live camera feed.

We had so much fun putting this together. Now it’s time to finish the assembly instructions and then we will build two more with the children in Ellis’ school. I’m also aiming at writing an extension for the Scratch programming language. With that, the kids can write computer programs that control the rover.