Freenove 4WD Smart Car Kit for Raspberry Pi 5 4 B 3 B+ Zero 2 W, Face Tracking, Line Tracking, Light Tracing, Obstacle Avoidance, App Control, Camera, Servo (Raspberry Pi NOT Included)

Quality: - The quality of the product is good. - Pieces go together well. - All parts are in-place. - All electronic pieces are working well. Shipping: - Shipping was quick and packaging was good. Handling: This is NOT a project for beginner or a child. This car is not to be played in the manner kids expect to play with remote control cars. This is NOT remote control car. Don't get me wrong, this car is controlled, by you from your Android app or computer because it is a full blown computer on wheels so it is connected to your WiFi. Kids should not drag this car around by hands or bump it in any way - car is bare naked computer with unprocessed fancy sensors attached to it. So should be handled with care. Skills: You should very comfortable very with computers and computer hardware parts. Troubleshooting experience will come handy and especially with Linux operating system - you must be comfortable with Linux terminal and various commands. Medium level Python programming skills will make this project easier. Sometimes you have to use common sense when connecting wires (for example camera wire) as photo on instructions are not precise sometime. However the manual is well made and covers A LOT OF STUFF, so if you are patient - you will get there and will still have some remaining hear you haven't manage to pull yet. Issues: The only issue I discovered is that wheels spin in reverse direction so when you press forward they go backwards and left and right are also reversed. This makes many things unusable. I wrote email to their tech support and got response in about two day - which I find very reasonable. First one to swap cables on the motor (which would require soldering iron) and another one is to make changes to the Python code in Motor.py and "-" in from of four "(dutyX)" lines. Despite the fact that updating was was way easier, I chose to swap wires for fun - haven't soldered anything in years. Other than that everything worked perfectly. MUST HAVE: Car needs two 18650 batteries. My recommendation is to buy 4-pack and a charger. These batteries power up a computer (RaspberryPi) with additional board, four powerful motors, many sensors, LED light, buzzer and camera. If you use the car actively the batteries will drain in about 2 hours which is not bad - so having a spare back will definitely help. FINAL NOTE: This is a great car and you can do anything with it. Great for learning programming and machine learning (ML). You could learn and apply all modern technologies and build amazing project. I am looking forward to updating the server part and train the car to learn various algorithm such as Reinforcement Learning. This car can to the same thing Amazon DeepRacer does because you can apply all the same technologies but Amazon DeepRacer is about $399 so I could not justify this as I can do the same thing on this car. ENJOY!

The well designed parts and 128 page instruction manual including the computer code make this car easy to assemble and operate. The ability to handle the testing of each module on a PC via RealVNC facilitates testing, and the phone app provides steering and speed control as well as control of the LED lights, camera and switching to other modes of operation. Tech support provides 24 hour responses via email and was very helpful for straightforward problems. All in all this kit offers a lot for the money and earns a five star rating. However, I encountered a couple problems that should have been handled better and distracted from my overall enjoyment of the project. Next to control from a phone the most useful function is the obstacle avoidance using the ultrasonic sensor for control. The ultrasonic sensor that came with the car kit was defective and was replaced after three weeks for overseas shipping. However, the replacement sensor was also defective, and in spite of my detailed documentation of the problem Freenove refused to replace it. I had an ultrasonic sensor from another project which I was able to use but it had intermittent errors that severely compromised this important function. The other problem was less serious but annoying and time consuming. The code downloaded to control the car had an error which applied less than a third the required power to the wheels for forward motion. Therefore, the car refused to move resulting in several days of emails blaming the problem on the batteries before I finally traced it to the code error. It has been three weeks since this problem was reported to Freenove and a download of the code today showed the error had not been corrected.

Pros: - Car works mostly as advertised - Fairly feature packed (motors, servos, camera, sensors, leds, line tracking, ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, etc..) - Instructions are fairly detailed with only a few weak points. - Software mostly works out of the box. - The server for connecting via an android app over wifi works, though the frame rate is slow and it is hard to control the car over it effectively. Cons: - This is very sensitive to the batteries you use. If your batteries cannot provide full voltage you may have trouble with the pi losing power at full throttle on the motors. - The camera and ultrasonic 'head' mount are connected via a separate piece that uses servos to allow it to move around. This is nice when the device is still, but leads to extremely unstable video when the car is moving because the mount is so weak. - Raspberry pi wifi out of the box drops a lot on battery. Turning off power managment for wifi helped immensely - Had to play with the motors to get them connected up in software correctly (doesn't match up with which ones are connected where). Overall this is a good base for a Raspberry Pi robot for those just getting started who knows there way around python and linux already. Some suggestions if you order this: * Read the supplied battery instructions in the freenove github website BEFORE ordering * Buy/Borrow a separate USB/USBc power supply for your Raspberry pi to use while setting up and testing. * Get a raspberry pi 4 vs an older model to get faster video

マニュアル（PDF）や組み立て動画があるので、初心者でも簡単に作れると思います。 組み立てた後、動作せず、私の手順が違うのかとサポートの方とメールでやり取りしました。 まず驚いたのが、１日以内で返信をくれるという返信の速さ。 メールの内容も丁寧で分かりやすかったです。 何度かやり取りした結果、新しい基盤を送ってくださり、無事に動くようになりました。 トラブルが起きたとしてもメーカーのサポートが充実しているので、安心して購入できる品だと思います！

It says so in the description, but do note, you need a Raspberry Pi (I used a Pi 3) and two 18650 batteries, which are not included. I was very keen to build this and try it out, so I downloaded the code and set up my Raspberry Pi, shortly after placing my order. Fortunately, I already had a couple of 18650 batteries. So, when the kit arrived the next day, I was good to go. Assembly took about 2 hours. First point to note is that I have big fingers and some of the screws are really tiny – I needed fine tweezers for these. Second point, when assembling the pan and tilt ‘head’, the instructions tell you to plug in the servos and run servo.py to put them in the correct position before assembly. I would recommend carrying out steps 1 to 9 of the 11 illustrated steps (page 51 at time of writing) before connecting the servos. I would also suggest connecting the cables to the camera and ultrasonic units before connecting the ‘face’ to the ‘neck’ as they are lot more accessible at this point. Excepting a couple of fiddly bits, the kit was straight forward to assemble, I ran all the test modules and everything worked first time, except it went backwards instead of forwards – but the instructions covered correcting this. It does everything shown in the Freenove video and can also be controlled directly by a phone app (android in my case). I was impressed by the quality of the build and also that all the code is open source. At the price, having a kit you can control from your phone, pretty much out of the box, is already good value, but the potential for writing your own code is even more appealing and I would imagine would be a great incentive for novice coders. I hope a community will develop where people can share their code and ideas. I also think the kit is ideal for further development – a robot arm would be a cool addition, perhaps Freenove may develop expansion kits in the future. In summary, a great kit, a great learning tool and best of all – open source!

Liked the kit, but the instructions has some holes and the mobile apps required to control the model leavs a bit to wish for. But over all it has potential and I will most definitely have fun with this one. All the parts are there, well packed and easy to follow instructions, but a bit un clear at some parts. Will get more kits. And I'm planning to upgrade this one.

It is a cool Robot. Easy to assemble. There is a tutorial available with every step to follow. It has almost everything to start with robot programming and testing. I recommend it for beginners who want to learn programming and do cool projects.

Essendo sempre stato appassionato di informatica e programmazione, ho voluto anche avvicinarmi anche all'elettronica. Per farlo ho comprato un Raspeberry ed un kit, sempre di Freenove, ed a quel punto ho scoperto un mondo appassionante fatto si di elettronica, ma anche di sistemi operativi (Debian) e programmazione (Python). Ho quindi comprato questo kit e l'ho assemblato abbastanza facilmente pur non avendo una grande abilità manuale, darei solo il consiglio di aggiungerci anche minuteria di riserva, perdere qualche vitina è facile. Finito il montaggio sono passato alla parte programmazione che è assolutamente ben guidata e spiegata, ed è veramente interessante e se ci sono dubbi il servizio di supporto risponde molto velocemente e risolve il problema. Concludendo, ora funziona tutto perfettamente, ma sto rivedendo i programmi per ampliare e migliorare le funzioni. Non vi dico che lo ricomprerei, vi dico che a brevissimo comprerò il kit del cane.