Following up from Part 1 - Body and Brain Assembly, today I will be covering Part 2 of Dexter Industries robot project, which will include connecting the motors, attaching the battery pack, setting up the WIFI connection on the Raspberry Pi, updating the software and testing the functionality of the GoPiGo2 Robot car.
Attaching the battery pack and cable motors to the GoPiGo2 robot car is straightforward. The red velcro strap wraps around the battery pack (I am using 8 SONY long lasting alkaline batteries); while the white and black cables connect to the four metal pins underneath the car.
Now that the battery pack is attached is finally time to power up the GoPiGo Robot by turning the switch to the on position. Once powered on, a yellow LED will light up indicating the system is on. The LEDs on the Raspberry Pi will blink telling you the Raspberry Pi is booting up.Once the yellow LED on the Raspberry Pi stops blinking, the Raspberry Pi has finished booting up.
To test the GoPiGo robot car's functionality, it needs to be hooked to a computer using the Ethernet cable, micro USB wall power adapter and WiFi dongle provided. So it's just a matter of connecting the Ethernet cable and WiFi dongle to the Raspberry Pi's Ethernet port and USB port respectively. Then, connect the micro USB wall adapter to the Pi's micro USB port. My set up is slightly different as my computer is connected to the Internet using a DLAN powerline adapter, which actually comes handy as it has two Ethernet ports.
Before setting up the network preferences, you want to download and install Bonjour Print Services to make it easier to communicate with the GoPiGo robot car by calling it by its name (dex.local) rather than using its full IP number.
Also, you want to check that the Raspberry Pi is communicating with your PC via Ethernet, and you can do this by simply writing in the command prompt "ping dex.local". You should get a reply similar to this:
Now, what you can do is update everything by clicking on "DI Software Update" and follow the instructions. Make sure to unplug the motor cables when doing software updates.