Modellauto

A home project for the electrification and automation of a model car by Felix Fröhling
This Project has no specific goal and is just for fun.

Project started on 16.03.2020

Documentation started on 02.04.2020

Table of contents

• README
• Hardware and Electric (Description of used components)
• Software (Description of Software)
• images (all used images)

Car Profile Picture

Project Description

Hardware

The modelcar is build around a raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian as operating system. As chassis i used an old RC buggy and replaced the combustion engine with an electric motor. The electric motor has a seperate controller which communicate via CAN bus with the raspberry Pi. In the front i added two ultrasonic distance sensors and a Picamera. Additionally to this, a Display with 5 buttons is mounted on the top for live informations. For further information take a look in the "Hardware & Electric" folder.

Software

For the software i use the Robot Operating System as framework, so i can combine smaller programms to a funktional system. Every Sensor and actuator has its own programm called "Node" and communicate with the other Nodes over the framework. So i can edit and test each subsystem on its own. The Nodes can be found in the "Software" folder.

TODO

• Battery supply of the engine
• Finish Startup menu on the display
• first field tests
• import face detection and tracking into ROS framework
• "follow the line" project with the camera

Tasks done

• face detection and tracking with camera (Done, up to 8 fps)
• Write python program to control the car with a gaming controller (Done, see Software/ROS-Nodes/gamecontroller_input.py)
• Image processing with python, so the car can follow a black line
• connect a display to Raspberry Pi (UART connection) (Done, See Software/ROS-Nodes/display_uart.py)