I’ve been hard at work with a few upgrades on the robot over the past few months and thought I’d share a long overdue update, and if you’re here from the Raspberry Pi blog, welcome! In this post I’ll talk about some of the upgrades to the robot I’ve not covered yet, and will cover each in more detail in future posts. This includes motor control using PID loops, odometry from the encoders, and using running a ROS node on a Raspberry Pi Pico/RP2040 based board.

The key upgrades? A Raspberry Pi 5, Pimoroni Yukon, a banging sound system! Wait, soundsystem?!

Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 4 was a massive upgrade from the model 3, the extra RAM being the biggest winner for me, but the CPU was still a bit slow compared to some other single board computers on the market. When the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced it sounded like it was the upgrade I needed! I managed to get on the waiting list only a few hours after the announcement and a month or so later the board arrived.

Plenty of others have covered the Pi5 in more detail so I’ll not give a review here, needless to say though it’s made on-robot development *much* easier. I was running VS Code on the robot before which allowed me to develop on it remotely, this worked but had a big overhead that can swamp the Pi’s CPU and RAM if you don’t keep an eye on it. The extra power of the Raspberry Pi 5 makes the experience more responsive and makes it feel like I’m coding directly on my desktop. I’ve not scratched the surface of what it can do yet, but I’m getting closer!

Pimoroni Yukon

One of the primary issues to deal with in robotics is controlling motors, interfacing with sensors, and all the other things required to interact with the real world. Typically you have a computer of some kind coordinating all the components of a robot along with dedicated systems that handle the actual hardware involved. Think of a robot as if it’s a ship, you have the captain in overall control but they delegate specific tasks to others who only interrupt them when something needs attention. They’ll tell the engine room what speed to go at, and they’ll deal with it unless there’s a problem with the engines. They may also have a lookout who’s job it is to watch radar, sonar, or other sensors, and only tell the captain when something will cause a problem.

In this instance, the Raspberry Pi 5 is the captain, the Luxonis FFC-3P is the lookout, each servo in the arms and head look after themselves, but the motors were still controlled by the Pi. The Yukon has helped fix this by taking up the role of the engineers. It has a Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip on board, same as the Pi Pico, and modules that allow for control of specific bits of hardware. In my case, a quad servo direct module, an LED strip module, four big motor modules. Code runs on the Yukon that listens for commands from the Raspberry Pi and actions them, it gives feedback to the code running on the Pi but does the heavy lifting itself. This means I can improve speed control of the motors using encoder feedback, and also use that feedback to provide position data so the robot knows how far it’s moved from its starting position.

Banging Soundsystem

I’ve wanted to have microphones and speakers on the robot since day one, for voice interaction and teleoperation purposes, but also fun. When I saw Eagle Prime throw its first punch at MakerFaire Bay Area years ago, they had some issues to work through with the code so used its PA to blast out some tunes to keep themselves and the crowd occupied while they got thing fixed.

I ended up going with a HifiBerry Miniamp and pair of Tectonic speakers for this, Matt Perks (of DIY Perks fame) recommends them and that’s good enough for me. I also have the Raspotify service installed on the robot so I’m able to use it as a Spotify speaker, works a treat!

Mostly though, it’s the easter eggs I can add…

I’ll be going through each of the above in more detail in future posts, so stay tuned for updates!