Raspberry Pi adds Trilobot
Author: EIS Release Date: Jan 6, 2022
Raspberry Pi has come up with the Trilobot robot kit.
Trilobot’s chassis is made of layers of resilient FR-4 PCB. The motor driver hardware is built right into the chassis itself so you don’t need a separate HAT to handle the motors.
It has a blingy gold bumper and a stylish reversible top plate. Bright onboard RGB LED underlighting is built in as standard.
Adding a Raspberry Pi camera attached to the built-in camera mount allows the recording of a robot’s eye view.
It comes with an ultrasonic distance sensor so it can stop itself from bumping into things but it’s easy to add more – there’s two connectors for plugging in breakouts with Qwiic or STEMMA QT connectors, and broken out headers for adding up to five sockets for Breakout Garden breakouts (requires soldering).
The hardware is supported by a fully-featured Python library, with controller code and lots of examples developed with the help of a top-tier Trilobot testing team.
For £48 you get the the Trilobot Base Kit, you’ll need to add your own Raspberry Pi, SD card, camera and battery bank.
Features
2x front wheel drive, 1x rear castor
Four tactile buttons and status LEDs
Six-zone RGB underlighting!
Front facing ultrasound distance sensor and camera mount (camera sold separately).
2x Qw/St (Qwiic / STEMMA QT) connectors
Hackable headers for expansion – a servo header, 5x headers for mounting Breakout Garden sockets (sold separately), 1x I2C header
Schematic
Mechanical drawings: Main / top / front / camera
Python library
The base kit includes:
- Trilobot main, top, front and camera boards
- 2x 110:1 motors with pre-soldered shims
- 2x motor cables
- 2x grippy moon-buggy wheels
- 1x ball castor
- Ultrasonic distance sensor
- Booster header for attaching your Pi
- USB-C power cable for connecting a power bank (not included).
- Associated nuts, bolts and mounting hardware
- To complete your robot, you will also need a Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi v2 camera, a microSD card and a USB-C battery pack.
A beginner friendly tutorial with plenty of photos to show you how to assemble the Trilobot and how to install the Python library.