IRONCAR

Hardware setup

You will find a tutorial on google docs here .

Raspberry-pi Setup

Easy setup with install.sh

You can easily setup everything on the raspi using the install.sh bash. To do so, go on your raspi and do:

$ ./install.sh

It will install keras, tensorflow, nodejs and some other dependencies in the requirements. This should take 2-3 hours... (scipy is very long to install). At the end of the install, you will need to choose if you want to enable the pi camera, i2c connections and augment the swap size (which is very small by default). And that's it, you should be ready to go to the launching part!!

Manual setup

You can install the requirements from requirements_raspi.txt yourself, but you will need to install tensorflow as well as nodejs and npm. You will also need to install the node packages from package.json. Last you will need to configure your camera and any other device to be enabled on the raspi.

Laptop Setup

You need to install the requirements_laptop.txt on your laptop only if you want to train your car with a gamepad and with the controller.py script. You can do it like this:

$ pip3 install requirements_laptop.txt

Otherwize, there is nothing needed for this part on the laptop, you will only use your browser to connect to the raspi via a node client.

Startup

In order to communicate between the car and the laptop or another device like a smartphone, we used socketio on python and nodejs. Therefore, we need to launch a server node on the raspi and clients on other devices. A python client on the raspi ensures the communication with the car hardware (motors, camera and other potential sensors if you want to add any).

Raspberry-pi

Two programs are to be launched on the raspi. You can use screen if you don't want to carry a laptop. Those two programs can be run as daemon if you really don't want to use a laptop.

server node:

$ node car_server.js

This will launch the node server. By default, it runs on the raspi localhost on the port 8000.

python client:

$ python3 ironcar_master.py

This will launch the python client that directly controls the car and takes commmands from the node server.

Laptop

If you have a gamepad to control the car in training/ direction auto and you want to control it, you can launch controller.py on the laptop (don't forget to change the ip to put your raspi's ip) You might need to change this script to adapt to your gamepad.
As an example, we used a xbox gamepad and listened to the left joystick for direction and RT trigger for the gas, LT to break.

Other devices

The user interface is a javascript client that can be launched in any browser in theory (firefox, chrome and safari have been tested). Just go to YOUR_RASPI_IP:8000 and you should be able to choose the mode, the model, the speed, and control the car with a keyboard (the keyboard is obviously not supported if you connect from a smartphone!).

philipy/ironcar