The below section/s describes the basic building blocks of the Pi-Bot. Each section provides a high-level view into the main building blocks of the Pi-Bot.

The Pi- Bot uses a rechargeable Lithium-Polymer / Lithium Ion battery. The small form factor of the bot and the drive system chosen works very well with a single cell.

There are two versions of the power stage :

1. One version uses a single cell power bank and runs the whole system at 5V

2. The second one uses a li-po battery with a battery charger/management module that provides the battery voltage ~ 3.2v to 4.2v

The drive mechanism was built using off the shelf Lego bits. The mechanism is a simple two channel differential track based system. The tracks are lego part #x939 and the wheels are lego part #55982. The track is driven by two metal geared DC motors that run at 300rpm at 3v.

The Control stage refers to the micro-controller that manages some of the hardware level functions for the Raspberry Pi. Functions such as motor control, battery voltage measurement are better left outside of Raspberry pi to make better usage of the single core processor on the Raspberry Pi Zero for other purposes.

The Pi-Bot uses a camera as its primary sensor to monitor the environment. A small breadboard on the top of the Pi-Bot enables adding additional sensors based on the requirements. A simple sensor could be an I2C based IMU to help with the orientation of the bot.

The Pi-Bot uses wifi on the Raspberry pi Zero-W for its primary communication. Based on the requirements, additional communication options like Bluetooth/Serial port/External radio(LoRa) can be evaluated.