In the beginning of the year Gil got me excited about electronics again. It had been a very long time since I built rockets with my colleagues of the Aerospace Section of the Instituto Superior Técnico, the university where I got my engineering degree in the field of robotics. We built sensors that we blasted into the sky at incredible speeds, propelled by solid rocket fuel engines. But that was way before André, Gil and their twin brother and sister were even born.
When Gil bought a Raspberry Pi in the beginning of the year we surfed the web looking for electronic components that could could be connect to it and found hundreds of components. The limit of what can be accomplished is now apparently limited to your imagination and tenacity.
When my wife and our kids came to spend the a week in Spain, by mid-may, Gil, André and I had finished the design of the RPy-Rover and planned it’s construction. The electronics we had bought arrived almost simultaneously and Gil and André were just as excited to visit their future home as to get started on the project.
During that week we did quite a bit of sightseeing, visiting Madrid and the nearby town of Ávila, with its beautiful and inspiring stone walls, where you can’t help but imagine knights and moores engulfed in epic battles, and donzels being rescued from vilains dressed appropriately in period costumes. These visits to really old places contrasted sharply with the visit we made to a cutting edge robotics shop called Complubot, in Alcalá de Henares, just north of Madrid, which we found to be a modern robotics maker’s paradise. We saw lots of technologies we had previously only seen in pictures on the web, from different types of Arduino to vehicle platforms like the Zumo. At Complubot André got a 3pi to start experimenting with programming vehicles, and Gil got some bits and bobs that we needed for the project, including an excelent soldering station that proved later that week to be worth it’s weight in gold, when we begun soldering the component pins and cables, our first hands on task of the project.
When we finished the soldering, which we did in just one day, I started working on the Xbee ZigBee radios and Gil got to work on the QiK motor controllers. Our first module experiences were true opposites, as I labored for months to complete my proof of concept (POC) and Gil got his module working with just a couple day’s work. Not that Gil’s module was trivial or even easy, mind you, because working with the motor controller required that he understood the UART and the motor controllers byte sized command syntax.
Seeing the rover chassis move was really exciting and turned the project real for us. We had before us something that began as just an idea in our heads. We made a short video of the motor controllers POC and Gil moved on to his second module, the camera, while I continued to kept going at the radios. Meanwhile André was having fun with his 3pi. He got it solving mazes in no time and even made changes to the bundled programs, to explore the 3 pi’s capabilities. The 3pi has the “brains” of an Arduino, so it is programmed in a striped down version of C. André knows Python but not C, but still managed to understand the examples and caught the gist of the language in no time.
By the time I drove the rest of the family to the airport we had a rover that could “walk” and “see”. André and Gil had before them the last school term, which meant that for the following weeks their focus would have to shift from the project to their responsibilities at school.
One test at a time, one day after another, the school year came to an end, and it was time for André and Gil to head back to Madrid, where they would spend most of their summer hollidays with nothing better to do but dive into the Euro RPy-Rover project and the swimming pool.
…But finish the Euro Rpy-Rover wasn’t going to be as easy as we imagined.
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Euro RPy-rover 
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