Waveshare 360° Omnidirectional High-Torque 2-Axis Expandable Pan-Tilt Camera Module, Compatible with Raspberry Pi 4B / 5, Driven by Serial Bus Servos, Based On General Driver Board for Robots

Needs to be built up. Lots of parts, no link to instructions, but easy enough to find. Some real small parts that make it a bit of a challenge for these old eyes. For North America, the small metric sizes meant made it a challenge, although being in Canada, not as much as those in the US. Not finished yet, but working towards it.

Well, I don’t understand why people complain about this kit so much, understand you are not buying a plug and play toy, this in custom hardware kit and you still need to work on it to get going, sure it wasn’t easy, but it worked for me. The main and the most annoying problem was assigning id’s to servos I tried minimum 50 times before it worked 😁 The documentation is far from the best and overall platform is not there yet, if you are not a coder or super advanced gemini and claude user at least, don’t try 😆 This will bring you at least two weeks of mental pain.

The camera works exactly as listed. It is much cheaper than building out a module individually. It's important for people to understand this isn't a toy, though. It does require technical aptitude and a separate raspberry pi/jetson nano which to operate. That said, setup is easy using Waveshare's wiki guides. Great product as usual from Waveshare.

The Waveshare pan-tilt module itself works, and when connected it provides a web server allowing the servos to be controlled. That part works great. The software which runs on the pi, however, doesn't work with current pi images. This is waveshareteam/ugv_rpi on github. In a nutshell, this project uses the "use a PyEnv and ship a requirements.txt file" approach that the Python community is so fond of, and it works fine until it breaks, and then it breaks spectacularly. In this particular case, the cardinal sin of unnecessarily restricting pip modules to specific versions is only the tip of the iceberg: many of the modules are themselves no longer available. A-whoops! You can't rush genius, or you get brittle software. Note that this happens when running on Python 3.13 (a minor version bump which removed a key module from its standard library, whoops! thanks for playing, kids) or when back-porting to Python 3.12, which *should* work except for the aforementioned "required imports are no longer available through pip and the project did not mirror and bundle them as it should have" issue. So, if you buy this, you're going to have to write the software yourself. Which is fine, as most of us plan to do that anyways, but now you've got no way of establishing that the thing works when you receive it. Which is ... not so great. Maybe it's a paperweight, maybe not. At least the servos work. All in all, I am glad I tested the waters with this purchase before forking out close to a grand for one of Waveshare's robotic systems. Be sure to check the github repo Issues for Waveshare projects before buying one of their kits.

I purchased it for a project and was able to go through the complete installation, but it is not compatible with the new pi 4 os or pi 5 os, I tried both, but the put-together video is only partial, skips necessary steps, and the end, you are left with a non working cool looking POS, Support by email said that they are updating something and i will be notified when it will be fixed. I'll keep trying; I will update you as soon as I can make this work.