Arduino Moon Rover in Action: Navigating the Lunar Landscape at Home!

[Music] hey robot makers hope you're having a good day so far we had a bit of a a panic then getting the Wi-Fi working in our house but all working now looks nice and strong so so hey robot makers do you want to learn how to build your own moon or Mars Rover with an Arduino kit from sunfounder then this is the show for you so let's die straight in my name's Kevin come with me as we build robots bring them to life with code and have a whole load of fun along the way okay let's get over to our notes I'm just going to silence that for a second so yes today is all about the adino moon or Mars Rover so this is um called the Galaxy rvi I've got it next to me on the desk we're going to have a good look at this today and I have a good play with it so this is from a company called sunfounder based in China uh and this robot has got some interesting features to it it's got a solar panel on it it has a realtime uh first person Vision so you can see what what the robot can see you can even move that around with a little servo it has some obstacle avoidance sensors so it's got an ultrasonic sensor and it's got two infrared sensors pointing out at different angles as well uh you can remotely control it with a smartphone app for Android or iOS and it's rough and train ready CU it's got these great big chunky wheels and a really interesting mechanism just like some of the uh the Mars rovers we'll have a look at those in a second like I said it has this Android and iOS smartphone app as well so you can remotely control it from your phone if you can get that to connect we'll talk about what that is in a minute it also has some underlit RGB strips these are really nice and it's all powered by an ESP 32 camera module and also an Arduino Uno for a lot of the sunry stuff it's beginner friendly and it the kit comes with everything you need and lots of online tutorials documentation videos how to assemble it all the tools and everything you need and also the micro controllers themselves so nice and easy it's a a really nice afternoon to put this together so let's have a look at some of these features in a bit more detail this is one I took just outside our summerh house you can see the blue there of the summer house uh so it's powered by an Arduino uno3 R3 clone it's not the official one I was just battling with arduino's IDE to try and convince it to upload the code um it has this real time U firsters Vision first person Vision First first person view um smart obstacle avoidance with remote control as we've said it's tough and ready it's got this really nice aluminum body like a lot of the sunfounder robots do so you might see the uh the pie dog which we'll be covering I think next week I think that's just behind me at the moment uh compared to some of these other robots I've got a different one here which is uh all plastic that cheap uh plastic uh whatever it's called the stuff you can laser cut um so this one is all aluminium which is really nice it means it's a really rough rugged and robust uh it's got a solar panel now you don't see this very often on robots in fact when I had this underneath the studio lights I could see that it was getting charge from the studio light just above it probably not very much charge but you put it outside it gets plenty of charge there so it can charge the LiPo battery which is just underneath which is really great um has this uh um nice power management feature on there so if it's outside doing its thing it can get some power while it's not being used I'm not sure just how much how quickly it can fill that LiPo battery versus how much the um the ad we or draws from it but the IDE will be you kind of power that out weo down manually let it soak up some juice and then you can let it go again has intelligent obstacle avoidance and some enhanced lighting the lighting is put to really good use on some of the the standard code that it comes with so it can Flash to indicate that it's connecting to Wi-Fi um and also just to to underlight the uh terrain that it's on and yes very very beginner friendly as well so Mars is a planet that is entirely populated by robots I love that fact there probably a few other planets that are as well but this one particularly so so the first Mars Rover um which was um the saera uh This One landed on Mars in 1997 landed in the Aries Valley region and it's one of the first wheel the first wheel vehicles to Rome unaided on another planet so um I'm not sure whether the Mars rover was actually the first and then subsequently they had ones on the moon but because I think the moon was mostly human operated like the moon rover and it's been operational for only 92 Martian days so these things have a battery the battery has only so long that it can you know move around and if the the solar panel isn't directly looking at the sun you're not going to get the charge that you need and it also has to have a uh an orbital platform as well that can receive those Transmissions of video or sounds or whatever it's been captured and trans transmit that back to Earth so there's quite a lot of kit that has to be floating around the the planet as well also on battery too so that was the first Ms Rover then we had spirit and opportunity so these are a pair of robots so um yeah these were in 2024 these ones landed on Mars and spirit AK um me a that was operated between 2004 2010 whereas the opportunity 1 that had an extra 8 years on Mars so they're still there they just run out of juice I guess the one of the issues with planets that don't have an atmosphere or very thin atmosphere is the dust can get everywhere and eventually that can cover the solar panels and they can't get the uh the solar energy they need to uh to operate so that one did various different geological and scientific missions as well they all have a very similar kind of look to them as well if you notice the wheels which is just like the robot that we have on the desk today so curiosity is a car siiz Mars Rover and that was designed um to explore the Gale cater on Mars as part of the uh M science laboratory Mission MSL so that landed in 2012 and has made significant discoveries including evidence of past liquid water on Mars as well so that one's the size of a car which is pretty cool and then we have perseverance and um Ingenuity I think which is I think my favorite Mars robot so per perseverance also known as Percy is most recent Rover to arrive on Mars and this is designed to uh explore the um jazero Creator a part of Mars mission 2020 and as well as the the scientific instruments it has itself it also has Ingenuity which is like a small experimental ma helicopter designed to be the first Martian explorer that can actually fly once it's landed it can never fly again so it's just like a regular drone in theory uh it's had 72 flights so far uh they planed originally up to five flights but it's had way more than that cuz how much fun must it be to operate one of these on Mars and it got up to 79 ft which is the highest altitude they don't need score too high just in case it crashes I guess they have a chance of it bouncing on its little feet there um it's the first helicopter to um be operated on another planet which is pretty cool had 128 minutes flight um 2 years lifespan it's flown 11 miles which is pretty cool for a little robot you can see on that little reference scale that it's about the size of a regular kind of drone trying to show with my my things but they're going off camera there so that's from the official Ms website so back to our galaxy Rover uh one of the key components of this is this esp32 camera module so this is properly the brains of our robot although it does have the Arduino the uino does a lot of the the sort of boring stuff like controlling the motors this one does all the fancy Wi-Fi and smartphone app interaction uh and of course it has a camera so it can see what the robot can see as well so if you like what I do and you want to make more of these videos and you want to be able to afford to buy a replacement switch for my uh for my studio here then please give this video a like um drop me a comment let me know if you've uh an interest in any robots yourself you probably have if you're watching this channel but let me know specifically is there any ma robots uh that you like many NASA robots that you like particularly if you haven't subscribed to the channel already please subscribe it means an awful lot to me for channel growth and so on so I do go live every single Sunday at 7:00 when my Wi-Fi is working properly so you can catch me there and you can hang out in the chat um and say hi so let's have a a bit of a demo shall we I'll show you the robot itself first let me just get my notes up on screen and what I will do I'll show you the robot itself it's just next to me here and I've got a few cameras that we can look at so let's try that camera first of all so you can see at the front there we we I've just got it on a box so it doesn't uh um roam off the desk while I'm trying to operate it you can see we've got the camera at the front there we've got the ultra Sonic Rangefinder and there's two um I just tilt this up a bit you can see there it's got two infrared sensors so there's just one here make sure that's in the right position and there's another one there and as I put my hand in front of these you can see that a second LED comes in indicating that there's obstacle there I'll try and do that on the other side without blocking the camera difficult to do at this angle let's see if I can do that you get the idea so it can operate left and right and see if these obstacles directly in front to the left and to the right but obviously we got the camera module there as well we have this great big solar panel on the top as well if we got up for the top down view you can see here we have the U great big solar panel there you can see the the side of the robot if I tilt this up a bit you can see the great big wheels it's got as well there's the Arduino Uno it's got a little hat on there for controlling all the motors connecting up the esp32 um the ultrasonic rangefinders and the infrared as well and also underneath there's a little battery it's like a little Pur specs box I'm trying to do this without damaging it too much so there is a little battery pack there and also you can see that there's some Led strips either side as well now one of the cool things about this robot if I can get this let me just move this box out of the way so I can move that down is look at this wheel assembly that they've got so there's two wheels there and then there's one on the back and all of them are fully powered by one of these TT Motors these normally are these sort of yellow colored um TT Motors so it's just a little DC motor with a little uh gearbox on there and then you got these two things that can rotate so each wheel is powered These are nice of SP spy rubbery Wheels which is pretty nice and also difficult to show you this the wheels are actually connected you can see this bar here this means if this one goes up the other one goes down so if I can sort of demonstrate that a little bit there and that means that the robot there you go if I operate that one at the back you can see how that kind of rack and pinion type that's not quite rack and pinion is it it's just a pivoted on that Central Point there but that means when it's climbing up over obstacle let's put this box down here there's an obstacle you can see there that it means that as one goes up the other goes down and it gives it more traction so it's quite a clever design that so what I'm going to do I'm just going to put it back on that box so that when we run some code it's a bit easier to do so what I will probably do now is I'll go over to this split screen view and I will open up the aduino IDE so what I'm going to do first I've got a couple of different pieces of code here these are all the the official um sunfounder code uh they broke them into a series of lessons we just um pull this one up just need to close a few windows down first and then I shall show you how to work this here we go right so if I go back over here so there's a whole bunch of lessons lesson codes it says there and these correspond to individual lessons on the uh uh the website so there isn't like a lesson one but there's lots of lots of other lessons there as well not sure why five has got four individual lessons but there we go so if we wanted for example to read the infrared let's load up that code and I'm using the Arduino ID as you can see there so we just need to select what board we're using so we're using that serial Port using the Uno it's not an official Uno so it it does recognize that it's not official right and now that's that there we can do the quick compile make sure everything's good all the dependencies are met and if I now do upload I can see that that's begin to upload now one of the interesting quirks on this robot I'm just going to put it onto the camera again so you can see this on the hat there there's a little slider that you have to slide and this enables or disables uh the connectivity to the esp32 camera cuz they're both using the same RX and TX pins um and that means that if you're trying to upload code you have to turn it off to be able to upload the aduo code it's a bit of a quirk I'm not sure what what their limitation was there on pins but clearly theyve use all the available pins that uh they could right so so that code has now been um compiled so if we upload that it's um flashing the LEDs so I don't if you can see on the uh just on the reflection of this box here as it uploads the code I'll do that again actually you you'll see there's little flash of green there and that's the uh the RX and TX pins which are also rooted through the RGB LED strips which is pretty nice right so that is now working so we now go to our serial monitor let's see if we can get this to do something so let's see what this code actually does so this is going to print the right infrared and left infrared values so let me see why I should be able to see that coming through there and I can't see it so let's just make sure we've got everything so the board rate is wrong there that's why so let's just change that down to 9600 there we go and as if by Magic we can now see um we can even plot this using the Arduino IDE so there's this little plotter we open this up and if we interact with it is it going to capture those no I don't think it's the plot is not particularly helpful in that one let's go back over here so if I put my hand in front of this you can see the left IR is now zero if I move my hand away that becomes a one if I obscure both of them you can see both of them now zeros again if I move them or if I just do the right hand one you can see that becomes a zero when there's an obstacle in front of it now these infrared modules have a little uh potentiometer a little pot on them it looks like a little um screwdriver Phillips screwdriver thing you can put a screwdriver in there and adjust effectively the distance but these are kind of on or off high or low Zer or one there's no distance with them so for distance we need to look at another piece of code so I'm just going to uh take off that one there so let's Lo load up another piece of code so ultrasonic read ultrasonic there we go so if I open up this code Let's Go full screen on this code for a second and have a look at this I'll go through some of the code I just want to sort of demo what it can do and then we'll have a look at some of the ad weo code in a bit more detail okay and feel free to drop any comments in as well if you're watching this live right so we're going to compile that that's good we're going to upload it and we are going to go to the serial Monitor and I'll go back over to this view over here ah so because I've got more than one um more than one window open the serial monitor can be open only one at a time so if I if I switch that one if I just get rid of that window there and let's just try the cial there we go so you can see the distance is 26 if I move my hand in the way you can see that's now dropping down now we did this on a lot of the very early smars robots if you've been on the channel that long so you probably get down to about 1 cm before two on this particular arrangement but that's the uh the thing that's pinging out one of these is a microphone and one of these is a speaker and that's pinging out a little ultrasonic sound if I point this at the microphone you can actually hear it um like you'll hear a little click sound we can't hear it in the studio but you'll be able to hear this at home if I point this at the let me know if you can hear that it's be sort of clicking away as it's uh banging out the Ultrasonics there so that's really really quite stable that um as I let go that you can see that those figures are not moving around too wildly which is pretty good uh and I think there it's the it's the actual um camera that's right in front of it that it's uh it's pinging off so that's the uh the effect that we're having there cool so that is the ultrasonic again can we see that on the plotter I'm a bit disappointed with this plotter I thought it would work better than this normally you can you can see the outputs but I think they have to be in a very specific format for it to work yeah that's not really working very well anyways right so that's the uh ultrasonic mark off which ones I've done okay let's have a look at the RGB LEDs next so let's find that so RGB color offset let's try that one and again we just have to set up this uh as a serial port and an UNO like so let's go back to the full screen there and see what this is all about I'm just going to compile and upload this um so people say that they can't hear the beep oh they could hear the beep oh that's disappointing normally you can hear like a little click click click click click maybe this microphone isn't sensitive enough for that or maybe I didn't have it pointing directly at it but thanks for the feedback on that one right so let's see what's going on here right if I go to the overhead what I'm going to do is turn the studio lights off uh so if I turn off the the overhead no let's try there of course now I want to turn off my studio lights they're they're powered by Wi-Fi because I had a bit of a a wobbler with my Wi-Fi there now not plain ball right put that down there I'm just going to manually turn off the uh the light so you can see that that's blue it looks like it's flickering and that's essentially like the frame rate of the update the refresh rate of the LEDs so that's like a purple cyan color purplish color a red I turn this over you might be able to see a bit better there see the LED strip that's that's a nice red color yellow green blue now in real life it doesn't look to be flickering at all this is just the camera's refresh rate um just happened to coinciding with the refresh rate of the RGB LEDs there so that's quite neat so you can see they can be used to sort of illuminate the background put the the light back on there okay we can we can also view that from the front as well if I get my box there you go you can see the uh lights just underneath there cool so that's the RGB one so what we'll have a look at next then is some movement so let's go for let's go for the camera Servo so I'm going there's a camera Servo uh I think it's called slide it's go range that's probably the one we want so let's just load up that one and I'll just close out some of these other windows that we don't need again we just have to tell it the the board and the serial number serial port and we can then upload this it is quite quick to compile I'm using a Mac M1 if anybody's interested that let's upload this right so let's let's go to the the front view might be able to see this a bit easier from there so you can see that the camera is being sort of tilted there there's a little Servo motor just a single Servo motor and just turn this around on this side as well you can see the servo motor is just there so that means we'll get a nice panoramic view up and down and obviously the robot can turn left and right to make that operate left and right this seems to be quite a common uh feature of these types of robots this other one I showed you before this wi-fi car I think this is called this Al also has the exact same thing an esp32 camera with a Servo so this can sort of turn up and down interestingly this one has an external antenna as well just to give it a bit of extra range and that also has a very similar I don't it's not the exact same but it's very similar kind of uh um hat for the they call them hats Shield for the uino okay let's get back to our robot and let's have a look at uh the last one we'll have a look at today which is let's go back to the code we'll go for this makes a lot of noise that's why I'm saving this one to last car move let's try this one so again we're going to set up the serial Port Let's Go full screen on this one we'll tell it it's an Arduino Uno board okay and then we'll just upload the code and then let's get back over to here so we can see those Wheels move oh it's it's not happy with that let me just try that again I'll just disconnect it and then try reconnecting it sometimes that helps don't there you go can stop that let's try that again just on the wrong serial Port that's all there we go compile upload it's not happy with uploading is it this time so Uno we're on the serial Port 110 upload there we go I can see it flashing away right the wheels are now spinning around let's go over to this one you can see there so if I had a bigger desk you'd be able to see this roaming around the desk they're pretty strong these tires as well now it kind of operates like a tank as in all all the motors on one side will will turn in One Direction and you can operate it they're all going in the same direction you go forward if they one's going backwards on the left hand side one's going on the forward on the right hand side it'll turn to the left and vice versa so yeah you can operate this um through code or you can use one of the obstacle avoidance codes as well let's go back over to to here so there's a few different pieces of a code we can try one of them will make the wheels rotate forward until the distance gets to a certain point say 10 cm away from from an obstacle and then it will basically stop now I wanted to show you some other things on here such as the um solar panel and what the hat looks like and also there is an app which I will try and get to work but um I've not had much success with this so if I now just switch that back on there so that it can talk to the esp32 camera and I'm going to load up the main code um so let's go back to the code so what do they call this one is it just app no I think it's a not lesson code it's one back from that so it's just called Galaxy Rover so we open up this one and there's a lot of dependencies in there again let's just make this an oo switch it to upload mode okay and click compile and upload there we go there we go so now if I switch back to to that so it's now going to try and connect to my home network um right so what I will do while it's trying to do that is I'm going to scan so on the the the phone app this is from sunf found I've got an iPhone uh so it's just called the sunfounder controller it works with all their robots that have Wi-Fi capability or Bluetooth capability and it's basically just going to time out it can't find it so if we go over to the serial Monitor and see what kind of messages are coming out of here I think it's on a different board rate though I think it's on the uh higher board rate 520 and let's just reset it I'm just going to PR press the reset button on it there we go so this is what happens I get these everything's okay it's streaming to an IP address so that currently is um on its own network so if I try and connect to that from my phone so it's acting as like an access point so I'm just going to try and connect to this on my phone so I actually don't get it listed the the access point should be called uh Galaxy rvr and actually don't get it visible on the list of available Wi-Fi hotspots so something is going wrong there um so it's getting an IP address uh we can change this to be um if I type in my own home um Wi-Fi username and password then it will actually get an IP address so I know it's connected to my home network the dxp server has given it an IP address and that means all the the passwords and everything right we still get the same error message where it just says web server plus null the plus just means it's like a command it's sending it and then it's detected that the camera is rebooted so something's going wrong with with the camera module now I did take the camera module off Flash the latest firmware so this is on the uh is it 1.4 version of the firmware I think it actually tells you up there esp32 firmware 1.4.0 however I'm not able to get this and this is really one of the selling points of this robot is that you can operate it with a smartphone so I'm a bit disappointed because I've not been able to connect to it to see what the robot can see now one of the other types of control that some other robots do so this uh Wi-Fi robot here that I've got I just switch this one on this one has a little infrared controller and there's a little infrared um receiver on there and if I press some of these buttons let me just figure out which one it is I can actually get the uh the camera module to sort of move about a bit I think the batter is a little bit flat on this one but essentially when I'm pressing these buttons on here see if you can see it on here what I'm I trying to show you I'm trying to show you that there's a little infrared light which is get it on the overhead camera so little infrared light which is just here as I'm pressing this you can see that's picking up the commands there so I quite like this this wi-fi car this has this nice little uh controller by Laughin this particular one uh and this was quite cheap as well I think this was about $20 thereabouts okay so let's get back over to our SL um there's not a lot more I can demonstrate on this one I can probably show you um the physicality of the robot one of the things I did want to show you actually was um what is underneath the uh the solar panel so if I go back to the overhead view and I take this down and unplug it let's just move that out of the way so there's a single screw on the back here which means it's nice and easy to get access to underneath I just unscrew this there we go so you can just slide this forward and then keep that connected we can see what's going on here so this is the uh the Hat the shield destroying the studio there I move this up a little bit there maybe twist this round so we can read it so this is the Galaxy rvr Shield see it's got the all the different connectors for all the six Motors on here and then there's various different connectors so this connector here connects to the esp32 camera uh these little gray wires um which are just this third rowback they connect to the infrared sensors uh and then there's another one which connects I think it's this this one just here which is the ultrasonic range f finder and then there's also the battery it can tell how much current is available from the battery as well and provide that um through the Arduino as a a battery level which is pretty cool as well um so what else is the I could show you the actual solar panel is quite impressive so if I if I get this here there's a little light I want you to keep an eye on which is if I just get these just in the wrong place there just keep an eye on those as I move the solar panel towards the studio light you see there and it's even providing power to the Arduino there as well and that's just from the solar panel so it's quite impressive that can it can power the Arduino or at least the shield um just through that power there and there's another switch on here which when you press that on that's Now using the battery pack underneath which is pretty cool so all from that little solar panel and LiPo battery and we can just put that screw back on there and everything will be in its place can't find where I put that now cool so I'll go back to the uh to the slides and just see uh what else we've got to discuss on here so I'm a bit disappointed with this in that I've not been able to show you that the app in full I've contacted some founder themselves to see if they've got any advice on what to do there I've used Wi-Fi quite a bit on my own project so I kind of know my way around IP addresses networking at a very low level as well so kind of it is what it is there okay so I think we covered off uh this I do go live every single Sunday 7:00 GMT so if you want to check out the show you can do there and we do have merch so you can get yourself one of these nice robot maker hats and also support the show at the same time they're not too expensive and they're really good quality I wear this one every single week we've got some of different colors as well so a lot of people in the US didn't like the Red Hats what's weird is political parties in different countries have different colors and for some reason I would have assumed that they were all the same so in the UK our version of like the Democrat Party which would be labor in the UK they're red but in the US red is the Republican Party whereas in the UK we don't have Republicans because obviously we're not a republic but we have blue for conservatives uh whereas the Democrats think they have blue don't they so it's kind of of like the opposite ends of the political Spectrum have different colors so you you can wear whatever kind of hat you you want but be aware that some people might not know the nuances of all that and might think you are of a particular political persuasion but I don't get into Politics on this channel we just all about the robots so get yourself a hat you can also join our Discord server so we are over on Discord if you go to Kev robots.com Discord you can get the sign up link there it's completely free to become a member of that and you can hang out with all the the people there on the who regularly join the show and let's see what else we've got so if you want to follow me on social media I'm all over social media so if you go to uh threads I'm at Kevin Mia threads. net on Tik Tok I'm Kevin Mia 6 on Instagram I'm just Kevin malalia on X I'm kevmac on masteron social I'm kevm masterdon doso and on um blue sky I'm at kevmac .b sky. Social on there as well so you'll get some behind the scenes pictures and updates on what's going on so if you want to help support the show there's some other ways you can do this as well you can get your name in the end credits we're going to have a couple of people called out in a second so you can do that either by doing a super thanks so that's if you're watching this on replay you can do a super chat if you're watching this live now and you can also join the YouTube membership program as well um that's just a little join button just at the bottom of the the main player there once you've subscribed or you can go to kro.com coffee so let's give a call out to some of the supporters of the show so far uh so we've had Alex just Alex um not you Alex another Alex who bought a coffee um I think he lik a couple of the videos uh so I just wanted to say thanks for that thank you Alex for the coffee uh we've got Nicholas Han and Wayne also bought coffees very recently in the past month and then on the the buy me a coffee membership we have Lee we've got um Alvaro we've got Maria Louise mayor we have Jeff Johnson DK um D I always get this one wrong DNK DNC marene Brent Tom shmy and Steve Phillips and then on the me the YouTube membership side we've got Dale from hybrid robotics we got Bill Hoy Warren steel Steve cross Jonathan R Ox 39 Vince John Paul Jolly alist wear Cassie from um I always ask Cassie do you have your own robotics Channel I can't remember if you do or you don't I know that um uh Lois does Louis robots um we have um tinkering rocks JDM Johnny bites handsome chair lights Michael and we have Tom who's our longest supporter so thanks Tom for sticking around for as long as you have done okay and I think that is everything I wanted to cover off on the the main channel so let's just have a quick look there yes that's that's my signal to say it's at this point in the video I'll say if you're watching this on replay thank you so much for watching and I shall see you next time check out one of these videos here

Channel: Kevin McAleer

Views: 1,385

Keywords: Arduino, robot, moon rover, mars rover, SunFounder Galaxy RVR, Galaxy RVR, Review, robot kit review, review, robotics, arduino project, arduino robot, nasa, moon robot

Id: 6XGtNjmqBts

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024