I was wondering if GoPiGo3 was compatible with pi 4 b. Also, does anyone know if the base kit comes with a wifi dongle or no?
Here is a summary from what I’m putting together; GoPiGo3 wasn’t available anywhere so I ended up buying a base kit from Europe and ordered the rest of the parts from Dexter Indus. I have a pi 4 b and would like to use that and not purchase a pi 3. After doing a bit of research on the wifi connection, I started questioning if pi 4 b was going to work with GoPiGo3 and if could connect to wifi without a wifi dongle.
You do not need a wifi dongle - the Pi 4 has built-in Wifi.
The Pi3B or 3B+ draw less idle power than the Pi4, but you can certainly use the Pi4. You just have to load the buster based version of Raspbian For Robots:
The GoPiGo3 power system will easily support using the Pi4 for general operation using less than full processing capacity, and can support basic vision algorithms. Just don’t attempt to run intensive machine learning or complex vision algorithms. The Pi4 can overheat and also can attempt to draw too much power.
Yes those instructions will get you going. They instruct to use the etcher utility which will work fine.
(The Raspberry Pi community has a newer SD Card prep utility called the “Raspberry Pi Imager” which you could also use: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ and since you haven’t received your bot yet, you can learn to use the etcher utility first using the Dexter instructions, and then try create an SD Card using the Raspberry Pi Imager and the “Custom Image” option which allows you to find your Raspbian For Robots zip file and it will write the SD Card.
I installed the image, configured my WiFi, SSH, all the region and timezone stuff on my Raspberry Pi before my bot arrived using a 2Amp 5v power adapter (and a short USB-A to micro-usb cable so that the voltage drop is negligible.)
I thought what I needed was a special Rasbian but I checked the Pi imager link you provided and that’s the regular Pi OS. Am I right? I have a fresh SD card loaded with NOOBS. The SD card should take care of the installation?
If I get this right, this is what I need to do, get my bot, assemble it, connect its red board to my pi 4, have my sd card in my pi and power it up. After that, I get the wifi sorted?
@cyclicalobsessive
Nevermind, I got what you meant. You didn’t mean the OS. You said to use Pi imager instead of the etcher. So, I still load an SD card with the Buster and then plug it into my Pi 4.
A lot of wifi dongles will be supported now. This is more a Raspberry Pi question, than a GoPiGo question.
You may want to ask on the Raspberry Pi forums if there are certain dongles you would need to stay away from. But unless you want two wifi connections at the same time, a dongle is not needed.
Navid, I also run both the built-in WiFi and a WiFi dongle on my bot.
For most people, using only the built-in WiFi is best for three reasons - it is always available at boot time, second- a dongle is going to draw down the batteries faster, and third - the boot process may make the dongle wlan0 one time and wlan1 the next. This last issue can sometimes be a problem when attempting to perform operating system apt-get updates.
The reason I put up with the wlan0/wlan1 issue is that I run my bot 24/7 and have sometimes, after running for several months had one of the WiFi connections stop passing packets, so that I needed to ssh into the other connection to clean up before rebooting.
Normal robots only need the built-in WiFi. Is there a specific use for the extra WiFi channel that you have in mind that you need a dongle?
No, one wifi connection is enough. I read wifi connectivity is weak without a dongle; that’s why I thought of going that route, but I would do the wifi based on what you explained.
My bot would have my pi4, pi camera, and distance or ultrasonic sensor attached to it and will control it with python. Can’t wait until it arrives!. Dexter was out of stock. I ordered the base from Europe and the rest of its stuff from Dexter. I got my Dexter stuff but still waiting for the base…
Did you buy a wall-wart (5v USB Pi power supply)? If so, you can start familiarizing yourself with the RaspberryPi, configuring WiFi, shutting down safely, moving around from folder to folder, checking disk space and free memory, temperature, all the Raspberry Pi stuff that has nothing to do with the robot side of things.
Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I got the power supply from Dexter and ordered a 32G sd card from Amazon. I need to pick it up from Amazon locker… Tomorrow, I plan to upload the Buster on the sd card and start config my pi 4. I’m sure the wifi part of it will take some time. I haven’t worked with pi before.
You can edit with any editor that does not mess up the file.
Most Linux text files use a different end-of-line sequence than most Microsoft Windows text files, and many word processing type editors on all platforms have a tendency to “correct” assumed problems without asking.
Therefore, using editors that herald from Unix/Linux or are Linux-aware is safest when editing Raspberry Pi files. I trust editors like Emacs, VI, Vim, Nano, and Atom not to mess with the file. You can use Notepad++ but there are some situations that confuse it, and I am no longer current on using Windows in a mixed platform environment (retired three years ago).
First, you should only add this if you see an ipv6 networking problem, so not needed yet!
Second, no comma, and no blank line before or after are needed.
(If you are seeing the file as one long line, you need to be editing with a different editor!)
Third, you wrote the line with spaces around the equals-sign - pay attention to spaces because sometimes spaces are mandatory, sometimes they are forbidden, and sometimes they are optional - I looked at my file and there are no spaces, so I would not add them.
Got it, thanks. I did all the editing and then wasn’t able to ping/ssh my pi. Spend hours…
Then, I hooked up a monitor to it and noticed the whole time was complaining about the (Dexter) Raspbian. It was saying it wasn’t compatible. To verify, I downloaded Raspbian from the raspberry website and it worked fine.
My guess is that the experimental version has some issues!. So, I may end up getting a pi3.
Interesting - If you have a couple SD-Cards, you can continue to investigate both R4R (Raspbian4Robots) and Raspbian with adding the Dexter software with:
