FREENOVE Tank Robot Kit for Raspberry Pi 5 4 B 3 B+ Zero 2 W, Crawler Chassis, Grab Objects, Ball Tracing, Line Tracking, Obstacle Avoidance, App Control, Camera, Servo (Raspberry Pi NOT Included)

The media could not be loaded. OK so this is a fun kit!The first thing to note is that you need a Raspberry Pi.The Pi has been in short supply and unscrupulous sellers are trying to get ludicrous prices so be aware!I strongly recommend sourcing your Pi first before buying this kit.A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4gb of RAM is a good choice and should cost around £60 or £80-90 if bundled with extras such as sd card and power supply.Reliable sellers include The PiHut, Pimoroni, Kitronik, Coolcomponents. There are plenty of others so it's worth a little hunt around.Some of these sellers let you register to be notified when stock comes in.You will also need a couple of 18650 batteries and a charger. I have found the BAk 18650 from nubattery.co.uk to be a good value choice and they also sell chargers.I have purchased several Freenove robot kits and I keep going back to them because of the high quality of their support team, any issues with the build or the programming and they usually respond within 24 hrs.This kit was a fun build and not too complicated. There are a couple of tricky nuts to attach when mounting the servos, my tip is to hold them in place on the servo with a small bit of sticky tape before fitting to the kit. My other tip is, when mounting the motors, to just use one screw at first so that you can twist the motor diagonally to make fitting the tracks easy (see photo). Freenove always supply a few extra nuts and bolts and I always need them as I have a tendancy to drop the occasional nut and be unable to find it afterwards! Be aware there are no spare screws in the servo packs, so be very careful with these!The instructions are a pdf file that you download and it takes you through the build a step at a time. Having completed the build there is a full set of tests to check every part of your build accompanied by explanation of how the program code works.Once completed you can control the robot from your phone or PC or set it off on it's own, hopefully avoiding obstacles or following a black line.For me, the best part is then moving on to develop your own code and if you have an interest in Python coding this is a great place to start, but the robot is fully functional without further programming if this does not interest you. Personally I'm looking forward to finding out just how much i can do with the front gripper.I think this kit is a great introduction to Raspberry Pi controlled robot kits

I bought this kit to serve as the base for a demo project. The idea was to have the basic components and features, and add my own atop of it, and it severely disappointed me.Batteries:This kit takes batteries, and nowhere in the description there was a mention that they were supposed to be 18650 Li-Ion batteries, which Amazon won't ship to some places (specially unprotected cells). There is indeed a reference saying "check the about batteries" page, but the first link I found to that came in the actual box that landed on my doorstep.The battery box connects to the board via a barrel jack, so you can use a bench power supply for testing as long as it can provide ~8.4V at a few amps. There's also no charging circuit on the provided board, so you will need your own separate charger.Assembly:The physical assembly takes 2-3 hours, mostly because there's a multitude of differently-sized screws, both in length but specially in diameter, so there's a continuous need of cherry-picking and checking references to make sure the right one's being used. To be clear, they *are* all individually and clearly marked, but this doesn't help the hunting when there's 15+ packages to rummage through, and some of them almost fit together.Note that you need to setup your raspberry pi and use it at least halfway through the assembly. This is because the instructions expect you to use one of the provided pieces of software to align the servo position before assembling the arm. The 2-3 hours I mention don't include setting up the rpi.Software:The provided samples (search FREENOVE on github, and lookup the repo for kit "FNK0077") do show the basic robot functionality, and the samples do roughly do what they say, albeit using the older RPi.GPIO libraries, instead of the currently-recommended gpiozero ones. Some of the commands stutter a bit, because there's no reference or pointer to using rpigpiod for it, which is what upstream recommends for minimal stuttering.The biggest problem, and the key reason for me giving low ratings for this kit, is once you're done running the sample demos, there's ZERO documentation on how to go from there: There's no documentation to any of the provided examples (besides "this is how you invoke it"), most of the example code has little if any comments describing the defines, and there's absolutely no reference, diagram, or schematic to the provided board functionality, or even which GPIO is each sensor/actuator connected to, if you ever want to write your own code. For a simple example, and the very first thing I had to come up with once I started, there's no explanation or any code for dampening the servo motion, so by default any movement leads to the servo immediately snaps to position, sometimes jerking quite violently in doing so.If you are in doubt, all the code they provide (at least as of this comment) uses BCM-referenced pin numbers, not physical header positions. They do explain the different ones (anyone is free to use whichever they prefer), but they never clearly state what their examples are using.One last thing:This isn't necessarily relevant to the kit, and I don't factor this in my rating, but this is not a good kit for you to build upon: There's no unused mounting point for anything else not included in the kit, and little space left too. The chassis is acrylic, so you'll want to be very careful if drilling extra holes to not shatter it.

This is a great kit but to the price you’ll need to add a Pi4 or Pi5 to complete it. The full features also need a second machine PC, Mac or Pi to get everything working. Loads more to learn with this kit as well.

I bought this kit for my son who is 9 years old. He has built some similar kits before with lots of help from me and this time, he wanted to build it by himself. He managed to do 90% of it but needed to have a little assistance with getting the nuts and bolts to the right tension, so the little robot arm/crane would work nicely. We had a little issue getting the camera to work but the support at Freenove, who make the kits, helped us to solve that without any problems.A lot of fun driving around using the camera to navigate picking up light objects like the supplied soft red ball and moving them around.