As our project progressed, we realized that having a separate microcontroller for the motor control would be a good idea so that the Raspberry Pi can focus solely on the “thinking” side of the robot. We have decided to use an Arduino Uno R3 for this task. The Arduino doesn’t handle any mapping or decision-making, that all happens on the Raspberry Pi. Instead, the Arduino’s job is to take the movement commands coming from the Pi and turn them into real physical actions on the car. Together, the two boards work like a brain and a body: the Pi figures out what the robot should do, and the Arduino makes it actually happen. A more technical description of the Arduino can be found on the Design Choices page.
Monthly Archives: November 2025
Making Progress
In the past week we have made significant progress in the development of our racecar. First, we finally got Gazebo working and were able to simulate a robot similar to our racecar in an environment and used it’s simulated sensors to navigate the robot to a selected point. This was a major stride towards the eventual path planning and obstacle avoidance of our actual racecar.
We also wanted to make a housing for all our hardware so that there were as few wires and equipment showing as possible. The design of this housing was done in Onshape and then printed on an Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro 3D printer. The print itself took about 7.5 hours and 300 grams of filament but luckily it only took two tries to get everything to fit together nicely.
Images of the Gazebo simulation and housing design can be found on the Progress page