It is a great (and interesting) time to be in AI and Donkey Car is no exception. A lot of updates have come this month for Donkey Car including a new car chassis, Donkey Car GPT, 5.X updates, Donkey UI updates and more. We are better at sending releasing software than sending newsletters
New RC car support
We have added support for a new RC car, the WL Toys WL144010. Given that many of the previous cars are hard to get, this should make it much easier to build a donkey car. The WLtoys car is available via Amazon (quicker) or Banggood (less expensive). It is worth noting that this is our first brushless motor car, this makes it slightly harder to collect training data at low speed than the other cars, but after testing it, we believe that it will not be an issue once you get used to it.
Donkey Car GPT
Try out the new Donkey Car GPT. It includes much of the community content and manuals for donkey car and does a pretty good job of solving Donkey Car problems for users
Donkey Car 5.X
Donkey Car version 5.X is currently being tested as our newest release candidate. In functionality it matches the current main branch but it will allow for a much easier user installation through pip. A simple pip install donkeycar will do the job in the future for everyone who does not want to read / change the donkey car source code immediately, but who just want to drive around. Donkey Car 5.X is based on python 3.9 and tensorflow 2.9, a steep and overdue upgrade from the current 3.7 / 2.2 versions.
Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm
The Raspberry Pi foundation has officially released bookwork, the newest Debian release: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/bookworm-the-new-version-of-raspberry-pi-os/.
Bookwork ships with python 3.11. We have tested Donkey Car on that OS using tensorflow 2.12 and found it working without problems, so hopefully we will have an upgrade soon.
Holiday Special at Donkey Car Store
Given it is that time of year - any donkey car store order over $50 placed in the store before tuesday will come with a Donkey Car Trucker hat, no need to do anything just place the order without the hat, and it will be automatically included with the order.
Donkey UI
The Donkey UI is undergoing a current upgrade with a bit more modern design and some changes to certain features, including user options to select the number of pilots that can be run in parallel and a user defined layout of the screen. In addition, there will be multiple config parameters that can be edited in the training screen. Here are some pictures:
Thank you all, we will try to do a better job of getting out newsletters