We’re going to be running a workshop at the forthcoming Digi Makers @ Bristol event showing people how they can control a robotic rover with Scratch. So we thought we’d share a picture of the Raspberry Pi robot we’ll be using for the event.
The Dagu Explorer PCB which we use to drive the motors on the Rover 5 chassis has a 5V voltage regulator which is rated at 1.5A so we can use that to provide power to the Pi. Not 100% sure yet how well it will cope with both WiFi and when the motors are running at 100%, but it seems very stable with the hardware we’re using for the workshop which is the Raspberry Pi camera and a bluetooth dongle.
Ideally we’d like to develop this into a full blown Raspberry Pi robot kit that we can sell alongside our Seeeduino/Arduino based robot kit, but we’re focussed on delivering a good workshop first. 
Our expanding collection of Rover 5 robots
When are you likely to go to market with the rover kit?
Hi Michael,
I keep on saying ‘about a month and a half’ but everything always seems to take much longer than I planned.
Regards
Alan
Hi, do you sell a kit to be built and used for a class project? I am a student at ITT-Technical Institute in San Bernardino, California. My three class ,mates and I are searching for an impressive project for our electronics capstone class. The rover you have is very impressive and interesting and a project like this rover or similar would be a great capstone project.
Any input you may have would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Sincerely
Larry Vasquez
Hi Larry,
Apologies for the delayed reply to this. We don’t yet sell a Rover 5 Raspberry Pi kit I’m afraid, but we do have another Raspberry Pi robot kit which we describe how to build here. It is possible to use the software we’ve written for the Raspberry Pi camera robot kit to turn our Seeeduino (Arduino) based Rover 5 kit into a Raspberry Pi robot, but we haven’t had time to document it I’m afraid,
Still, depending upon what you wanted to do for your project, it might be possible to take the software we’ve written and adapt it to create your own Raspberry Pi robot. The mini driver board that we use in the Raspberry Pi robot kit can drive 2 DC motors so we’ve had customers adapt the kit to driver RC cars etc.
Best of luck with your project, and if you need any advice whilst building it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Regards
Alan
Thank you for your response. Your feedback gave me some ideas that might work once I present it to my teammates/classmates.
If I need any advice I will take you up on your offer and ask. Thank you.
Sincerely
Larry Vasquez.