March 2022 Donkey Car Newsletter

New Release, New Hardware, More Events!

New Software Release - 4.3.6

It is the first new major release in 9 months.  14 committers across 30 features! Thanks to everybody involved.

Changelog here.  Most notably there are many quality of life features in here, especially developed by @Ezward, many training improvements by @docgarbanzo, and many improvements in OLED support and RC control by @zlite which is relevant for the next announcement!

New Donkey Car Hat

Since the beginning of Donkey car, we have gotten two consistent pieces of feedback

• Let me use the RC controller that is included in the box with the RC car I purchased 

• Can I skip the servo driver and just use the GPIO on the Raspberry Pi.  

While over the years, many folks have hacked their own solution to solve these two problems, but we did not have an opinionated approach for new users to make it easy to get started. 

We are happy to announce that we have built a new donkey car hat, this new hat enables users to skip the servo driver, but also get a board that has several other interesting features.  In particular:

• CPU Fan - the raspberry pi 4 needs a fan or a large heatsink

• OLED screen - tells you critical state information without using a linux shell

• Odometry connection - Easy and opinionated way of connecting odometry

• Throttle and steering servo control - eliminate the servo controller

• Throttle and steering RC Input - use a 2 or 3 channel RC controller

One note, this board only supports the Raspberry Pi.  The NVIDIA Jetson Nano does not support PiGPIO.  If you have a Nano, please continue to use the servo driver and Bluetooth controllers.  Special thanks to Chris Anderson for designing the board and iterating on it. It can be purchased at the Donkey Car store (here) and in Asia at the robocar store (here).

New Battery Holder

Most folks use two batteries in their donkey car - one that powers the ESC and Servo and a second that powers the Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano.  Most people use the Anker Astro E1 battery, it is a tried and tested battery that provides several hours of power, but there was never a good place to mount the battery… until now.  Since we added the new donkey car hat, there is now a place to screw the battery mount to the Donkey Car.  You can print the new mount here and will need zip ties 

April 2 Race!

On April 2, there will be an in-person indoors race at the Robot Block Party at Circuit Launch. Competitors register here; spectators register here. 

We also have a virtual race in our online simulator on April 9th. Register for that here. 

Finally, the outdoor racing season is getting ready to kick off, which allows the use of GPS and other outdoors localization technologies. We’ve experimented with a figure-8 track in the Circuit Launch parking lot, which was fun. 

We’ve also tried racing at Warm Springs Raceway, a RC racing track in Fremont, CA. That was super fun and we hope to be able to do an event there later this year.