Review on 🔌 Yahboom Raspberry Programmable Electronics: Unleash the Power of Raspberry Pi by Veronica Ramos

In short: Great project with great support! Rating 4.5/5 It has been a difficult year filled with natural and financial disasters, political divisions and a pandemic that has forced people to stay at home. Medical experts have urged us to keep our distance at holiday events, including children's Halloween treats. That's how I came across the Yahboom Raspberry Pi 4WD AI Robot Kit. I was looking for a sturdy little robot capable of pushing candy to children from a distance. Although I studied programming in college over 25 years ago and dabbled with several Linux and Raspberry Pi desktops, I had little to no experience with electronics or robotics. This Yahboom kit looked pretty solid, strong enough to carry fun sized candies, fairly adjustable and relatively inexpensive. The Raspberry Pi kit and computer board arrived in early October. All parts have been included along with schematics identifying the acrylic supports, sensors, servos and motors. There were many screws and support posts ranging from 8 to 22mm in length and 2 to 3mm in diameter, so a metric ruler was essential. Over the course of 4 days and evenings, I studied the assembly instructions and online construction videos and successfully assembled them. Be sure to refer to both for best results. It worked! Not at first. The battery could not be charged properly. The bluetooth app also didn't connect until I transferred it from my buggy phone to a cheap tablet. (You should also connect via Wi-Fi to see the video output.) After those issues were fixed, this robot started rolling around at a brisk pace! It worked on my floor, carpet and slightly sloping cement road. The app can also beep, change the lights, and pretend to put out a fire with the front fan. Once the hinged clips and Halloween decorations were in place, it was ready to go and the kids loved it! Candybot delivered his treats quickly and kept a safe distance of up to 20 feet. Mission accomplished! There were several disruptions. The tracking module is less than 2.5 cm off the ground. When I awkwardly set it up on a pair of small feet, the screws holding it in place came loose and had to be adjusted. The eyes (ultrasonic modules) were left off-center, likely due to structural failure. I never got the camera or its servos to work properly so I unplugged this part for Halloween. This led to one of the main reasons to buy this product: Yahboom's technical support is fantastic! Years of useless tech support elsewhere left me with low expectations when I sent my first email to support@yahboom.com on Saturday night. Surprisingly, a detailed response came within 30 hours, apologizing for the weekend delay. Our correspondence has continued over the past few weeks as I share the results of their technical advice and sometimes receive a response within a matter of hours. We found out the camera was defective and would be replaced and some clumsiness prevented me from installing some servos. The support staff walked me through the C code adjustments to correct the alignment of the ultrasonic module. It was almost as if I had a friend all over the world who had a vested interest in my success with the project. Wonderful! A few flaws still need to be ironed out, so I'll give it a 4.5 instead of a full 5, but I hope the Yahboom robot has already done its job perfectly. Also, this project provided a distraction from all the chaotic news this year. Yahboom support also helped me get acquainted with the online code repository that gives users access to advanced features like collision detection, light tracking, face recognition and gesture control. So the basic design is simple enough for a motivated middle or high school student to handle on their own, but the complexity can be scaled up based on time and interest. Potential buyers should be aware that most features work well with the Raspberry Pi 3, but updates made just a few weeks ago offer users of the newer Raspberry Pi 4 improvements, including the ability to remotely access the The device's Jupyterlab integrated programming environment to access C or Python code for an open-source computer vision library and related AI capabilities. (An unexpected benefit: you can connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to your installed Raspberry Pi and get a full computing environment to directly access and compile code, access the internet, and even play around with a desktop environment. It's like a fantasy computer case, although the cables limit your robot's mobility.) All in all, I'm grateful to Yahboom for putting this kit together and providing fantastic tech support as it's helped me and others in my area celebrate Halloween -Enjoy activities and have fun time. in the past month and probably in the coming months!