Chapter 9. Building an Arduino Spy Robot

In this last project of the book, we are going to build a small surveillance spy robot based on Arduino. The secret agent will be able to command the robot remotely from a web page and see what the robot is seeing in real time using a camera.

To do this, we will use everything you have learned in this book so far:

  • How to use Wi-Fi with Arduino
  • How to create control interfaces
  • How to use a camera with the Arduino Yun

Let's dive in!

Hardware and software requirements

First let's see what the required components are for this project. The core of the project will of course be the robot itself. For the robot's chassis, you have a wide range of choices available on the market. For this project, I chose a DFRobot MiniQ 2 wheels chassis, which is a small robot chassis that you can easily mount Arduino boards to.

Then, you will need two Arduino boards for this project. The first one will be an Arduino Yun, which we will use to connect a USB camera, just as we did in Chapter 6, Building a Cloud Spy Camera. For the camera itself, I used a C720 camera from Logitech again.

The other thing you will need is an Arduino Uno, which will take care of driving the motors of the robot via a motor shield. We have to use an Arduino Uno here because the Arduino Yun is incompatible with most of the motor shields of DFRobot.

To control the motors, I used a 1A motor shield from DFRobot. In order to control the robot remotely, we'll also use the CC3000 breakout board that we used in an earlier chapter. To assemble the CC3000 board with the rest of the robot, we will also use a DFRobot prototyping shield.

You will also need a 7.2V battery pack to power the robot when it is not connected to your computer. I also used a DFRobot battery pack with a DC jack adapter.

Finally, here is a list of all the components that we will use in this project:

On the software side, you will need the latest version of the Arduino IDE. You will also need to install the following libraries using the Arduino library manager:

  • Adafruit CC3000 library
  • aREST
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