robotics

A collection of robotics projects that I have been tinkering with to learn more.

Features

• Drive it around manually using an Xbox controller
• Visualise data, lidar, camera views in Foxglove
• Speech to Text (STT) and wake word detection using OpenAI Whisper and Porcupine
• Onboard LLM! It has Ollama running inside docker, using the TinyLlama model. Any voice commands will be sent into the LLM
• Text to speech (TTS), any responses from the LLM will be voiced back to you, so you can have conversations!
• Lidar, it'll map the surrounds
• More features coming!

How to install

(this will become much easier when I find the time to Docker-ise it, but for now, we'll just install directly onto the host system)

The instructions are quite long, see the INSTALL for the full instructions.

How to run

I've made it very easy to run the robot:

make build
make launch

You can also run individual packages such as make launch-senses if you wanted to run a single subsystem.

It'll run the foxglove bridge too, so point that at ws://pi5:8765 and you'll see this

It isn't particularly useful on it's own, so run the "bringup" which will launch all components, so you can control it and see sensor data etc

Parts List

Here is a list of the parts I used. Aside from the Pi and the Logitech webcam, everything else I got from AliExpress. See the HARDWARE page for more info about the build.

• Xiaor geek tank chassis
• 2 x JGA25-371 12V DC Gear Motor Encoder, 280rpm
• Raspberry Pi 5
• Logitech Brio100 webcam
• Cheap USB speakers from AliExpress
• Xbox controller (this must be one of the newer, bluetooth / USB-C models. The OG xbox one controllers had a proprietary wireless protocol)
• Cheap Buck converters from AliExpress to step down the 18v to 12v for the motors and 5v for the pi, and 3.3v for LEDs / motor encoders
• 2 x BTS7960 H bridge motor drivers
• 150mm x 150mm acrylic sheets to make the layers of the robot stack
• Various m3 spacers, smaller 10mm for holding PCBs, then 50-75mm to space the layers depending on whats in them
• Dupont cables, box of JST-XH connectors, 14awg for the batteries/motors, 22awg elsewhere
• Googly eyes

Why am I building this?

Mostly curiosity, and I enjoy tinkering with things and solving hard problems. Robotics gives me a fantastic platform to explore and learn:

• Electronics, hardware design, and soldering
• Software, ros2, python, c++
• Computer vision, machine learning, and AI
• SLAM, navigation, and autonomy
• Visualisation and simulators
• CAD and 3d printing (for when R2 eventually gets a new body)