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.

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.