Raspberry Pi Devastator Robot #2 

I have a lot of respect for this guy and his videos; great quality.

Completely agree, bringing creations from computer code to the physical world is very satisfying.

Great video Christopher. I am running the later 3.5.3 version of Python and I found that the autostart file was in a different location from your older version of Python in the video so I had to search for it. I also found that the autostart file was write protected so I had to change the file permissions so I could write to the file and save it. Here are the steps to help others... I am jumping around between the different windows here... First, search for the autostart file, on the 3.5.3 version of Python (or whatever version you have installed)... sudo find / -name autostart My search result was: /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart Then, select "File" At top left of screen. Select "Open". Change directory to /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/ Change the "Files of type" field to "All files (*)". To make the autostart file writable, (if required) change the file permissions with the following two lines... cd /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi sudo chmod a+w autostart Select the "autostart" file. Open the "autostart" file. Type in the following after the existing lines... @lxterminal -e /home/pi/Python_Code/bootup.sh Note: The "-e" means the following file "bootup.sh" will run in the terminal window. Select "File" At top left of screen. Select "Save". To test, reboot the Pi. Hope this helps someone out there save some time in finding the autostart file and make it writable!

Its kinda funny that the raspberry pi is a lot more powerful than a computer sized an entire room from the 80s

Th info about powering the pi from the battery back is such great information that can be used over and over again in so many different projects.

Nothing says Christmas quite like a Devastator robot!

Looking forward to you next video on this project. I liked your testing it outside. Nice touch. Merry Christmas!

Thank you for another excellent video. The bright green eyes are too cool. Thanks for covering the boot script details. This is lacking in so many other tutorials. Learned a lot. Merry Christmas.

Outstanding presentation. Clear and concise. Thanks for considering the overscan issue for those of us casting to TVs.

Nice video. It’s good to see it on this channel. It gives explaining computers a deeper meaning. Merry Christmas!

Thank you for the Pi robotics videos! They've helped me finish my Pi Zumo. I'll be moving on to the Devastator these summer hols!

Wow ! I was waiting for this video😊 And Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, Christopher! Thanks for all of your excellent content in 2017, and I hope that 2018 is a great year for you.

I didn't think that this would be very useful to me but I watched it because you explain things very well. However, I have struggled to get auto booting Python scripts to work so it turned out to be extremely useful. Many thanks and best wishes for a wonderful Christmas.

You could connect the second light(the one which indicates the Pi is booted) to turn on the motors automatically when everything is ready.

An excellent video, Christopher! Very interesting, informative and entertaining. Tanks for posting it. HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Why not add a relay or transistor replace the motor switch, with the sensor wire running to Pin 29? This way, instead of having to flick two switches, pin 29 will both light up and enable the motors. Then, when you shut the pi down, it will automatically cut the power to the motors. You could do something similar with a few transitions (or maybe an AND chip), where a momentary contact switch turns on the power circuit for the Pi, and losing signal on Pin 29 will cut the power to the circuit. It will take some of the fuss out of starting up and using your new toy.

The Beast is alive. He does look a bit scary with his menacing green eyes. He needs a name, "The Beast" seems to fit, I'm not sure if you agree. Merry Christmas to you and all of your viewers.

Merry Chrismas Mr.Christopher ! And a very happy New Year.... That robot looks awesome with the green lights for the eyes .

Merry Christmas to EC and your family. Have a happy a healthy & safe one.

Merry Christmas hope you have a fantastic day today , and thank you for all the fantastic videos

Thanks so much for an interesting tutorial on Raspberry Pi. I hoping to see Devastator Robot evolve. Keep up the good work! Happy Holidays to you.

I know it’s an old video but great job, I enjoy watching your content. Side note you could also use a 2n222 transistor for a switch just power the base from a GPIO pin!

Cool. I think I would go with raspberry RGBW lights for the eyes so you can give it a bit more personality. Red = mad Green happy Blue sad Orange while watching the sunset Random while dancing (would be even sweeter if it could dance according to the music it's listing to inside a software defined box)

Wonderful robotics video, Christopher! Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Consider those rocks devastated! Well done.

This is great - I have one of these platforms, and I'm using a WiPy board to serve up a webpage to drive it from. I'd love to switch to using a Pi Zero. One way to make startup and shutdown easier could be to make the OS read-only, and safe from corruption should you wish to switch it off without a software shutdown. I also second Jack Linde's idea of a relay for the motors :-)

Merry Christmas Chris! Two days ago, I finally got my RPI Zero W up and running!

Great videos your making here. I'm happy I stumbled across your channel earlier this month!

Great Job in showing how to add code and boot code thanks keep up the good work.

Now let me explain some technical Raspberry Pi Devastator Robot terms: Experimenting / evaluating - akin to children’s learning experience commonly called playing. In-depth Evaluation - long-term playing / learning experience. Adjusting drive mechanism - mucking around with innards, a.k.a Playing. Coding robot controls - yep. More playing, this time keyboard tinkering. Keyboard control - remote control playing. Field evaluation - playing outside. Satisfactory Experimental Evaluation - Excellent Adult Playing / Learning Experience. Testing - Playing / Tinkering. 👌😂 Cheers, Ian

My only real quibble is the tracks. I'd have made them easier to adjust, and used maybe rubber blocks in them too. Maybe even put a tensioner pulley on for the tracks.

You could turn this into a waiter to deliver the Christmas dinner to the table tomorrow :-)

Good show Mister Barnatt. Just in time for Christmas and an enjoyable little video as well.

Amazing to wake up to this on Christmas morning :) great vid. Merry Xmas

Old electronic equipment is cool. Analog and digital watches are super cool. Pie charts and curves are logical. If you suddenly show relevant stuff on an analog multimeter my brain has to "switch gear", just like when you switch to analogue watch after year of just looking numbers.....

Merry Christmas!

Very cool little project, Chris! Bring an engineer myself, I completely agree that seeing code running a practical application is exciting.

now put a mini Christopher puppet on the top of it as the driver. Have a Merry Chistmas Chris !

Awesome build. I can't wait to get my Devastator tomorrow!!!

You are someone I admire and respect. Thank you for sharing your knowledge wit all of us. High quality teaching and content. You're the master ...👍

I love your videos very much. Especially interesting for me was this video series. In the video number 2 you shorten the tracks. Well, that I would not do that is so intentional. This allows the tracks to avoid branches or stones. If you shorten the tracks this can damage the drive when driving outside. The branches and stones are without mercy.

Great Video as always. One word of caution, the motor driver board you use has an onboard LDO (7805), which shares power input from your +12V input. Its output dips very often when the current requirement from the motors increases suddenly. These high demands are, unlike plastic gear motors, quite usual for the large metal gear motors on the Devastator platform. All the voltage variation can lead to detrimental effects on your Raspberry Pi Zero. You should look into a better motor driver for this platform and a steadier power source (maybe a buck converter?) for the Rpi. Merry Christmas :)

Merry Christmas

Hey i find the other keyboard library in Python it's getch You can install it with pip install py-getch import getch char = getch.getch() getch is more efficient because it doesn't clear your terminal but it can run it without clear the terminal Sorry for my bad grammar hehe

Merry Christmas everyone

Brilliant video as always!!! Merry Christmas

Another excellent video! Thank you for making these and sharing them with us. Merry Christmas!

that was brilliant Merry Christmas

You can eliminate the motor switch, by replacing it with a relay, connected to a transistor, and then connect the base of it, to the second green LED.

You can also add a mic and a speaker and then run Alexa or any other voice recognition software and control it using your voice. It will be great. And yeah !! I love the video. And I have created my own voice recognition software, in case you need that pls do tell me.

Wonderful! Merry Christmas to you... Xx

The GPIO pin driving the “ready” LED could be used to enable power to the motors via a relay rather than having a second toggle switch.

Hello Chris, If you want to vary the speed of the robot, the L298N Motor Controller has PWM inputs that are normally jumpered (called ENA and ENB). I connected Pin 33 and Pin 12 (by board reference) to ENA and ENB to control left and right track velocity of my devastator.

When will you be doing a follow up to this? I’ve built my own version using a toy rc tank, I’ve bought a camera and got it working but would like to see what you have to say about controlling it as an FPV style bot and the possibility of controlling it via the internet. Thanks for posting these great videos.

I'm really wanting the third episode in this series

A thought - you could have the pi handle the power management to the motor driver with a relay. So then, the motor driver would only come on after the pi had booted and turned it on. And you could turn off the motor driver as part of the shutdown sequence when you press shift-s.

Very Nice! Happy Christmas from Tennessee

I've learnt heck of a lot in this video, thank you.

There's definitely a whole 'nother level of fun when the focus is of the screen and on another object. But do you ever have a moment of thought where you wonder if the day will come in the future when the Devastator gets ahead of you with its' own intelligence? Can't wait for someone to build one that washes windows, scrubs floors, does the sink, tub and toilet and fetches the mail. I would have added 'cooks dinner' too, but I like to have SOME control over what I eat :) Thanks for a great year of Explaining Computers ! Merry Christmas from Ontario, Canada.

Well Done Chris.

Very well explained. Enjoyed it very much. Thanks sir. I hope to see more of such videos in future.

Great video! Didn't realize I could run OS commands through the python script. Should help with some other stuff on my robot.

You might have given me an idea if I had the money and confidence to build something similar in one of the larger Warhammer 40,000 tanks.

An occasional cameo from Mr Pliers, the Hitchcock of EC World.

I think the play in the track is needed, because of the suspension travel .

happy new year Christopher and if you have time could you include a video on how to add external hard drive onto a raspberry pi 3, hope you had a good mass

Nice robot! Instead of a switch to turn on motors you could use a bi-stable relais that is controlled by the code after startup and before shutdown. Merry Christmas.

Thanks professor looks like that was a fun kit to put together as always Nice upload sir and have a merry Xmas .

Merry Christmas and have more wonderful EC clips ahead in 2018

Very cool video, will be getting a Devastator soon! Thanks! Your robot looks mad :)

this series has inspired me to do my own robot and would love to see a follow up to this video :D

Merry Christmas Christopher

This is amazing :) really want to build this :) Merry Christmas!

You make it look so easy :-) Very good!

merry christmas sir chris.

Nice video! I am looking forward to the next part... 12:20 I also like your ancient style multimeter. Maybe you have been having it for longer than modern computing exists, I guess... You would not have dreamt of what you would be using it for nowadays when you bought it, right?! :) Fortunately, voltage and resistance are still the same... :D Cheers from Germany. Happy Christmas!

I'm looking forward to any upgrades the robot will receive, maybe a head and some AI

Very nice, and merry Christmas good sir.

Lipos are NOT as dangerous as people like to say. Every cell phone and laptop has a lipo in it. Do we go around stressing that they will explode at any second? Nearly every catastrophic failure in a lipo is due to some sort of negligence. Either the batteries are over charged or discharged, used after they get old and or puffy, physically damaged etc. Lipos almost always give warning before they fail. The problem is hobbiests spend a lot of money on batteries and dont want to replace them when they "still work". This leads to failure and since people dont take responsibility for their actions it becomes the batteries fault.

Good stuff. Happy holidays!

the auto start only works when you have a GUI installed. Else you can use auto logging and add it to .bashrc in ~/pi/.bashrc :-) that's the easiest way for people who are not really familiar with linux.. there are better ways to handle this but they require a bit more knowledge of the runlevels. I always run headless and with SSH on my portable devices. Great video as usual! and a great robot base.

thanks for the video!! looks like a dandy little robot.

The devastator on test with those mean eyes 👀

Thanks. Excellent tutorial.

Merry Christmas!!!

Sir Im Currently Student oF Computer Science After Leaving Engineering Field And Currently Engaged In BS Computer Science . My Request iS To Can you Do a Video On Extensive Working Of Such Project As Im a Turn Backer to this Field But My All Skills Have been Faded Since 4 Years...... Its Very Nice Of You to Do A Video On Window 98 And 2020 easy Robot Training Thru Coding of Python

When sill you continue this series, I'm really excited for it!

Merry Christmas have a happy New Year

I do like this type of video. Lovin your cool retro analog multimeter .

Merry Christmas To All..

Can you hook it up to a wireless controller (like Sony's Dualshock via Bluettoth) and get some programming to handle the input sticks (or at least the D-pad)? It would be so awesome!

cool project very impressive coding robot building

Great Video, I am watching this at the end of 2021 and the auto start on boot no longer works that way! Any ideas on how I could do it?

Love this series of videos of controlling a robot on tracks. How about adding speed control?

in your setup when you press a directional key the robot keeps moving in that direction. what if we wanted to make it so that when we press a directional key the robot would move in that for a fraction of time unlike now when the robot keeps moving unless another key is pressed

I got a Raspberry Pi! Now gonna use it for home automation! ;)

*sir.. how can i assign a keyboard key like we can do in arduino i.e. when i release a key then motor stops, what is the need of assigning a different key to stop the the motors*

Talented chap.

Your Zumo and Devestator robot series was great. Do you plan a follow up with more features?