Freenove 4WD Smart Car Kit for Raspberry Pi 5 4 B 3 B+ Zero 2 W, Face Tracking, Line Tracking, Light Tracing, Obstacle Avoidance, App Control, Camera, Servo (Raspberry Pi NOT Included)

I purchased the Robot Car as fun project for my grandkids and as a part of their ongoing STEM Learning process. I must say that the car for the Amazon price is a great bargain. When it comes to assembling the car, the Youtube video and tutorial, along with lot of other Freenove and Raspberry Pi resources are big help and provide in assembling it. I must say I have lot of experience with assembling stuff and repairing, and after following the Tutorial I had no trouble completing the assembly. It was a difficult task for the grandkids given very small screws and care needed.Testing of the modules was pretty straightforward until I came to testing the camera. From my past experience, I was using PuTTy (SSH app to connect to the Raspberry Pi) and sometimes used the VNC also. But the camera test did not work when testing from Terminal window of PuTTy. I checked all connections (particularly the camera cable) and configuration details mentioned in the video and tutorial. Everything seemed correct. The "camera.py" test generated lots of errors when running it from Putty Terminal. I looked up Raspberry Pi support pages on camera and it mentioned trying "libcamera" app that comes with the OS. And that worked fine and generated camera images with any errors.The camera app mentioned in the tutorial still did not work. So I decided to seek help from Freenove support team. I sent initial email with the details of the problem I was having and the errors that I was getting. They came back quickly, in less than 24 hours, and asked for some pictures of camera connections and output from couple commands to check configuration. They told me to run the camera test from VNC (Terminal window in VNC instead of PuTTy). I repeated the test and it worked without any errors. They explained that the app needs come of the GUI and needs to be run from VNC. Anyway, the problem was resolved fairly quickly and I must say that the support and response time was excellent.I have been retired for a decade now and as IT professional previously I always used PuTTy. I am kind of disappointed about that. It is probably because of the way the Freenove app is written. For now the car is ready to complete testing different modes and for my grandkids to play with it and learn programming.

Quality:- The quality of the product is good.- Pieces go together well.- All parts are in-place.- All electronic pieces are working well.Shipping:- Shipping was quick and packaging was good.Handling:This is NOT a project for beginner or a child. This car is not to be played in the manner kids expect to play withremote control cars. This is NOT remote control car. Don't get me wrong, this car is controlled, by you from your Android app or computer because it is a full blown computer on wheels so it is connected to your WiFi.Kids should not drag this car around by hands or bump it in any way - car is bare naked computer with unprocessed fancy sensors attached to it. So should be handled with care.Skills:You should very comfortable very with computers and computer hardware parts. Troubleshooting experience will come handy and especially with Linux operating system - you must be comfortable with Linux terminal and various commands.Medium level Python programming skills will make this project easier. Sometimes you have to use common sense when connecting wires (for example camera wire) as photo on instructions are not precise sometime. However the manual is well made and covers A LOT OF STUFF, so if you are patient - you will get there and will still have some remaining hear you haven't manage to pull yet.Issues:The only issue I discovered is that wheels spin in reverse direction so when you press forward they go backwards and left and right are also reversed. This makes many things unusable. I wrote email to their tech support and got response in about two day - which I find very reasonable. First one to swap cables on the motor (which would require soldering iron) and another one is to make changes to the Python code in Motor.py and "-" in from of four "(dutyX)" lines. Despite the fact that updating was was way easier, I chose to swap wires for fun - haven't soldered anything in years.Other than that everything worked perfectly.MUST HAVE:Car needs two 18650 batteries. My recommendation is to buy 4-pack and a charger. These batteries power up a computer (RaspberryPi) with additional board, four powerful motors, many sensors, LED light, buzzer and camera. If you use the car actively the batteries will drain in about 2 hours which is not bad - so having a spare back will definitely help.FINAL NOTE:This is a great car and you can do anything with it. Great for learning programming and machine learning (ML). You could learn and apply all modern technologies and build amazing project. I am looking forward to updating the server part and train the car to learn various algorithm such as Reinforcement Learning.This car can to the same thing Amazon DeepRacer does because you can apply all the same technologies but Amazon DeepRacer is about $399 so I could not justify this as I can do the same thing on this car.ENJOY!

Pros:- Car works mostly as advertised- Fairly feature packed (motors, servos, camera, sensors, leds, line tracking, ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, etc..)- Instructions are fairly detailed with only a few weak points.- Software mostly works out of the box.- The server for connecting via an android app over wifi works, though the frame rate is slow and it is hard to control the car over it effectively.Cons:- This is very sensitive to the batteries you use. If your batteries cannot provide full voltage you may have trouble with the pi losing power at full throttle on the motors.- The camera and ultrasonic 'head' mount are connected via a separate piece that uses servos to allow it to move around. This is nice when the device is still, but leads to extremely unstable video when the car is moving because the mount is so weak.- Raspberry pi wifi out of the box drops a lot on battery. Turning off power managment for wifi helped immensely- Had to play with the motors to get them connected up in software correctly (doesn't match up with which ones are connected where).Overall this is a good base for a Raspberry Pi robot for those just getting started who knows there way around python and linux already.Some suggestions if you order this:* Read the supplied battery instructions in the freenove github website BEFORE ordering* Buy/Borrow a separate USB/USBc power supply for your Raspberry pi to use while setting up and testing.* Get a raspberry pi 4 vs an older model to get faster video