Raspberry PI Rover Upgrades

I recently picked up the Pimoroni Garden hat and some sensors to play with as it looked like a neat way of swapping breakout boards around without wiring or soldering.

Soon after I thought why not upgrade my rover with the hat so it can drive around measuring air quality, temperature etc… Then I remembered I had my phat stack board lying around and the project turned into lets see how many hats I can stack on the rover.

 So first I added the phat stack with the breakout garden hat, explorer (motor) phat, four letter phat and a scroll phat HD. For convenience I also attached  USB hub / Ethernet adapter. This makes it easier to work on the PI if there are any Wifi issues.

I tested everything worked and whilst being blinded by the scroll phat I had the idea of using it as lighting for the front mounted camera.

The breakout garden also gives you access to some of the pins allow you to add yet another hat with ease. The scroll phat only needs the I2C pins and power so with 4 jumper cables it was powered up at the front of the rover. I used double sided tape and a cable tie to hold it in place. As there was now a free set of pins at the rear of the phat stack I added the touch phat so I could run scripts on button presses.

With the lighting in place I decided to see what affect it had on the camera. It certainly looked bright enough to illuminate the area in front of the rover nicely.

Here with no house lights on you can see the power of the scroll phat.

This is another view from my desktop looking at the stream from the camera.

I am pretty happy with how this rover is developing it certainly has the potential to do a lot of cool things. The next thing on my list is to add a light sensor so that the scroll phats brightness is controlled depending on the light level and turned off when its not needed.

I also need to play with the sensors and oled screen I have in the breakout garden. One sensor measures temperature, pressure, humidity and air quality whilst the other detects acceleration on three axis and has a compass.