Freenove Three-Wheeled Smart Car Kit for Raspberry Pi 5 4 B 3 B+ B A+, Video Mode, Radar Mode, App Control, Ultrasonic Distance Sensor, Camera, Servo (Raspberry Pi NOT Included)

Pros---------These guys set the standard for support! The fastest support that I've seen. What I like about the system:(1) It is an ideal platform to grow on since they open sourced their code for driving the smart car shield. Consequently you can use the shield as a basis for more advanced projects at a fraction of the cost of Lego kit.(2) Extremely responsive in support to answer questions clearly and thoroughly.(3) Components are well made and the directions in the tutorial are clear. I recommend doing a git clone of their repository to get the most recent changes to code and tutorials.In summary, if you are looking for a good starter platform for autonomous driving projects, this is an excellent basis.Cons---------These are very minor and should in no way detract from an excellent product. Consider it feedback to make the product even better than it is.(1) Be a good idea to port to QT5 since Qt4 is no longer supported.(2) Be nice to abstract the hardware interface a bit more - mdev.py has all of the hardware control of the board but might be good to break out into a separate python class. I plan to do this myself.(3) Consider allowing the distance sensor and camera to operate at the same time. This will make the system even more useful for autonomous car projects. The board supports this so just need a different base.

I bought this robot for my son and he had a lot of fun with it. We tried to program this robot on a Mac and luckily were able to, since my husband is a programer. This was sort of difficult. I would recommend this product for people with Windows. There are many things you have to install. On Windows, you can install these things so much easier than on other operating systems. So, it's not that it's impossible to do on another operating systems but it makes it very difficult and will make it take a lot longer than it should. The robot itself was very good and my son loved it. We installed the camera on it and it worked great. The robot has different lights, it beeps, and the camera can move up, down, left, and right. Also, the camera can go back to its original positional by clicking a button that says home on it. You can fine tune many things and even control the speed limit. All in all, this is a great robot for people with the operating system, Windows.

I bought this project to work on with my brother. I took a coding class in college and he (being 16) has no experience with coding. The project was easy to put together as the instructions are very well written. We had no trouble at all except on one part where we had to tell python to download the necessary files for the robot to work. I just downloaded them manually and put them in the right folder and everything went great. There was one piece that seemed not to fit so we contacted support and they got back right away. Like with in 20 minutes on a Sunday on December 23rd. I couldn't believe the customer service support. The part didn't fit so they sent us a new one after some troubleshooting didn't work.Not only was the project a lot of fun to work on, but both my brother and I learned a lot along the way. We kept calling other family members over to show them all the cool things the robot could do.Lastly, the stuff you need to supply are a Rasberry Pi, microSD card, and two 18650 batteries. That's it.We will probably get another kit from Freenove because this experience was so good.

This is the first kit I've purchased. After assembling the kit and writing some C code to control everything I have a neat little autonomous robot that'll drive around the house. I learned that ultrasonic sensors are probably not *the* best thing for object avoidance but it mostly works.I have a lidar kit coming in that should fix that. I also added a GPS unit so the robot knows where it's at (mostly - still dealing with some jitter). Once I have the lidar scanning the camera will be mounted on a pan/tilt mount so I can do object identification (opencv).I would suggest buying extra servos (SG90s are cheap) and experiment with additional electronics. It's a very fun kit to tinker with.

At first, I was wondering why the turning didn't work so well. Then I realized numerous screws had fallen out of the robot. Figuring it was my mistake, I hunted them down, which wasn't easy to do on carpet, and rebuilt the robot. Driving it around again, I had screws fall out of the robot, again. This time, I was sure it was not due to them being loose, as I had started to strip the included (size 00 or 0?) Phillips screwdriver. If someone told me I should use screw sealant, I would have been much happier with this purchase. Something else that might work is using a larger screwdriver to better tighten down the screws, but if you do that I would still strongly recommend keeping a close eye out.Finally, I've given this a 3 rating, as I'm not confident that other robot kits won't have the same problem.

This has been a lot of fun. It takes a while to put together but it's fun to tinker with. There are a couple ways it could be better though:. 1. It's not designed to operate with camera and sonar simultaneously. 2. A visual programming mode (a la scratch) for kids would be nice. 3. Looks like other similar products from freenove have face recognition and following functionality out of the box. Why not this? Overall though we enjoy this and it's definitely easier than building something like this from random parts