Introduction:

Pi-Spy is a Raspberry Pi based surveillance rover that has long battery life and almost no lag.

This project can be divided into 3 parts:

1) Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi camera

2) Building the rover and the motors

3) Putting it all together

Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi camera:

To start using the Raspberry Pi we need to install the Raspberry Pi OS on a SD card and put it in the Raspberry Pi.

For that install the Raspberry Pi Imager from the following link:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/

After installing you can see 3 options that you need to select:

1) Raspberry Pi device: select your device

2) Raspberry Pi OS: Select preferred OS

3) Storage: Select you SD card from the List

Once you have installed reboot the Pi.

Raspberry Pi Camera:

After rebooting open the terminal and type 'sudo raspi-config' and select 'Interface Options', 'Legacy Camera', 'Enable Legacy Camera support'

then you can reboot.

After rebooting open a new Python file named 'camera.py' and paste the code given in the attachment.

You can do it by typing 'python camera.py' in the terminal

You will find the camera stream on "http://<IP Address>:8000"

Replace '<IP Address>' with your Raspberry Pi's IP address.

Building the rover and connecting the motor:

I made the rover using metal parts that I found:

For controlling the motors I have used L298N motor driver:

The rover does not use servos or a third motor to turn. Instead, it uses the L298N motor driver's ability to change the direction of turning of the motors.

The controls work this way:

• Forward: Both the motors turn in the same direction i.e. clockwise to go forward
• Backward: Both the motors turn in the same direction i.e. anti-clockwise to go backward
• Right: The right motor turns anti-clockwise and the left motor turns clockwise
• Left: The left motor turns anti-clockwise and the right motor turns clockwise

The rover can be controlled by the arrow keys(which are self-explanatory) and it has 3 speed modes slow, medium and fast.

The key 'a' is used for slow, 's' is used for medium, and 'd' is used for fast.

Run the 'wheels1.py' file in the terminal to control the rover.

The schematics are given in the attachments.

Putting it all together:

To put it all together and make sure everything runs smoothly I will be using a custom PCB, the Gerber files are there in the attachment.

We can run the 'camera.py' and 'wheels1.py' simultaneously to control the rover as well as get the video stream.

Here is the working video: