So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

Last week I wrote up how to prepare the UCTRONICS robot I’ve been playing with for hacking.. This week, I’m taking a break to update an old tutorial from five years ago: how to use a gamepad to control a Raspberry Pi. This post has been around a few years, and I just found out that a bunch of images broke, so it’s time to update with a new Pi and easier-to-follow instructions.

Last week I assembled a Raspberry Pi-based car kit. I bought the kit from Amazon. (Affiliate link.) The car has a live video camera, a sonic collision sensor, and a line-following sensor. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi to go with it. I recommend a 3 B+. The car works with an Android or iOS app, and the apps are functional enough, but where’s the fun in simply relying on them?

Subtitling this one “Adding a Gun Turret” seems almost like click bait, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. One of Dexter Industries’ sample projects is attaching the Dream Cheeky Thunder Cannon to the GoPiGo. I’m going to show you how to control it with the same gamepad that also controls the robot’s movement. In part two of this series we connected the gamepad events to the GoPiGo movement commands.

Welcome to part 2 of my series on working with programming the GoPiGo and a Gamepad controller with Python. In part 1 I talked about what a gamepad “looks” like to a Raspberry Pi and how the excellent evdev package makes it easy to read and process information from it. I finished the post with a script that reads buttons on the gamepad and prints the direction it would send the GoPiGo in.