PiCar-X

This robot car kit was lots of fun to build, and now I'm using it to practice python programming and TCP data communications. It brought back the fun I had as a kid building Heathkits. But unlike those kits, once you're finished building this robot car, you can make changes and improvements. The hardware has extra pins where you can attach new sensors, actuators, etc. For example, I'm planning to put some cheap radar sensors (RCWL-0516 which are less than $2 each) on my robot to supplement the ultrasonic sensor that it comes with. The robot software is also easy to "hack" (modify). This would be a good project for a child who wants to learn about electronics and computers, but they should have an adult (with some technical experience) nearby to supervise. There are some tiny parts, and some (like ZIF connectors) are delicate, so you need to be careful. But it comes with good instructions (printed and on-line) and screwdrivers. (You have to supply the Raspberry Pi.) Definitely a good project, and I'm amazed at the low price. It was an excellent way for me to use the Raspberry Pi 3B that was sitting in my drawer.

Says works with raspberry pi 4 but only has camera ribbon cable for pi 5. Build on hold until I get another $10 cable. Hope this is the only issue. UPDATE , my apologies , another cable was in the box. Got a quick response from vendor to resolve just from my review. Everything went together with no problems. I also added a mount and a small Elecrow 5" touchscreen on top. All the Sunfounder You tubes videos from Robojax also a big help. It took a lot of time to do it but I'm new to python and all the AI software. Learning a lot and hope to get grandkids interested it it

Bought this for my 15 year old son’s birthday. It seems to be really good quality. My son is pretty tech savvy and says it functions well though he says the instructions are really confusing on putting it together and using it with his raspberry Pi. He feels younger kids would definitely need an adults help.

Great product, well packaged and documented kit. Was able to get it up and running on my rpi5 with no issues. Had a question / issue that support addressed with professionalism and patience (and ultimately I think a user error on my part - the small screws in the servo bag are all you need and not the pointy one on the printed sheet).

Amazing content and lessons paired with the Pi Car x. You can spend a lot of time working on it and even then learning new commands and how to write scripts and understand the pre written ones. Website has lots of great content and would 100% recommend!

Good product with a real good tech support group. They were quick to respond (overnight) to a problem I had with the firmware I had install on a picar-x. They corrected my problem and unit works great! Every email I sent I received a fast respond back. This is the type of company I like to do business with. I will be looking at more of their products because of their support group. Thanks

It’s advertised as working with pi5 but it doesn’t unless you do heavy script modifications. Even after doing all of that the camera never worked. I wasted a week of my life on this.

Most recent update: tldr: All in all, it is really cool when it works, but it is time consuming to both put together and then locate the OS image, then download and configure the software. Add to that the possibility that you get it figured out and working, and then the camera breaks (like what happened to me) and you are taking your chances. If it wasn't for the camera going out, and no way to swap it out, I'd keep it. The company was kind enough to give me a refund without expecting me to try and put this genie back in the bottle/box it came in or anything. Hopefully in future products they will make it easier to repair/switch out the camera (the Achilles heel I just couldn't get around), get some led headlights on it, and make the app easier to choose between the internal & external wifi adapters so you can add one with a long antenna, which seems to make the video in the app come in at a higher framerate. And also downloadable configured images for each model of raspberry pi would be a very welcome and time-saving addition to this. I'm not sure if they could, but it would be nice to get a working wake-word before sending video and audio to OpenAI for processing, like 'Alexa' or 'Siri' or 'OK Google'' does, so you could leave it on without chewing up your bill while it makes the robot wake up and spout nonsense. Update (original): I finally get everything going, lights, better wifi, then for no reason, the camera quits. Since it gets put together with rivets, I can't just unscrew anything to do anything. Now it's totally useless, just errors out. What a waste of my time and money! Beware these things can't be easily taken apart and repaired! Notes: I couldn't use the HDMI on the pi after completing assembly. Remote access through ssh or vnc if you chose the desktop installation, is the only access. If you leave it running with the GTP 4o on, it will get a message (From OpenAI?) every few minutes like, "Thanks for the video", which wakes it up to start talking nonsense and leaving you wondering why. Super irritating. I can't figure out how to get GPT4o to work free either. This opens the question of "Do you really want OpenAI to have all this video information of the insides of your home?" Can they mine this information for marketing purposes? What would really be nice is if they'd have images for the different pi models available to download, instead of making everyone painfully install the same thing from scratch. If I buy a wifi router, do I have to painfully download the OS and software, & install it before I can configure it? A simple thing to do, yet they don't. The camera is absolutely terrible in low light situations, not even that low. They really should incorporate cheap led headlights you can remotely turn on and off so you can see where the heck you're going. I installed the recommended OS, which has the full desktop, on a pi 3. The video feed is atrocious if you aren't practically directly next to it, following it around. Otherwise, you may occasionally get a frame or 2 after a few seconds, sometimes more. I ordered an external wifi adapter with a better antenna for it, hopefully that will help. If you have an extra pi laying around, and time to spend on this, and want to dive into python programming, or are gonna be happy with their remote control app - which actually makes this useable right away - this is for you. I wouldn't go out and buy a pi on top of this, because there is no guarantee that your python skills are ever gonna make this better. PS. MS Code locks up running on a pi 3 with desktop OS, don't bother.