Self-Driving RC Car Project — Part 2

After purchasing all of the equipment, we agreed it was important to take the time now to establish the project structure in order to document our work, be able to easily troubleshoot issues, as well as be able to easily replicate/advance on our previous work in case we decide to build another car. Up to now we have been using separate services for documents and code…..Google Drive for documents and administrative purposes, and GitHub for code. After considering other products such as Confluence, and Wiki, we decided to stick to Google Drive and GitHub. (please leave a comment if you have suggestions)

Having everything in the “cloud” allows for work to continue seamlessly when someone is unable to attend, and not have to depend on anyone’s machine.

Now about our meeting location…..funny enough, our meetings take place at The Office Coffee Shop in Royal Oak, MI, which is a coffee shop just like the name implies. Every week we reserve specific time slots and split the costs among attendees. The space is limited to about 6 people and there is definitely no space for a test track, which we are going to need once our car is ready. Our meetings last anywhere from 2 to 4.5 hours depending on the task. Luckily, The Office Coffee Shop has been very flexible with allowing us to stay late, as long as were-reserve the room for additional time.

We meet through a meetup (also checkout our Facebook Page) and are open to anyone; therefore, we have many folks join who are not part of Udacity but have just as interesting of backgrounds. This makes it fascinating as people bring very different skillsets and awesome life stories. As of now, everyone works in tech and our group mainly consists of engineers (we are definitely not limited to engineers only though). However, the one thing that brings us all together is our interest and passion for technology.

And now a little about the structure of our meetings….at the start of each session, we split up the tasks, such as getting Raspberry Pi up and running, getting the Arduino working, and figuring out how to wire the RC Car remote control just to name a few. These tasks will obviously change meeting to meeting.

The biggest part of getting the Raspberry Pi running was installing the OS, however, the task turned out to be rather simple and the Raspberry Pi was up and running very quickly after installing Raspbian OS (thank you Pratyush Valluri). The Arduino was also fairly simple. We bought some LED’s to run preliminary tests, which were easy and successful, installed Arduino IDE, and were able to flash the microcontroller.

However, we hit a roadblock when time came to getting the Arduino to operate the RC Car remote. We had off-the-shelve code for the Arduino and could flash it, but the wiring had not been completely worked out. The RC Car remote control uses H-Bridges and since our experience with H-Bridges was limited, we kept messing up the grounds. As we did not give up and kept trying we noticed that if only had one wire was connected at a time everything worked fine. Therefore, we decided to install relays (thank you Mikhail Bordyukov)…..these will be tested during our next meeting, so keep an eye out for our next update.

We also connected the camera and were able to see the image on the Raspberry Pi. The next step is to try it with our Python code.

It is amazing to be able to meet, interact, and most importantly learn from the amazing group of people we have! Thank you everyone for attending and sharing! Until next time….DAVG….