You want the UGV Beast. It’s useless to even pretend that you’re not interested in your own little camera-toting tracked drone. The fact that Waveshare’s expensive little project involves a lot of self-assembly just makes it more attractive.
We ran across WaveShare a little while back, with the company advertising a slightly different Raspberry Pi-based device. The PocketTerm35 is cool, sure, but does it have tank treads? The UGV Beast is undeniably cooler, but there’s also the older UGV Rover from the same company if you have specific… needs.
UGV Beast of a project
The setup from WaveShare comes with everything you’ll need — including the main Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 board and a pan-tilt module, so you can play in the dirt the way your childhood self always wanted to. But if you’re just getting the main setup — the pre-assembled chassis, controllers, and so on — you’ll pay just R4,400. The Pi and the module cost extra, but if you’re supplying your own…
There’s actually not much work to do, besides dropping in your mainboard and getting to programming. Control of the little tank is via a web-based browser if all you want to do is drive it around. Anyone with Flask, Python, or (for colour recognition) OpenCV can make it do all sorts of interesting things besides ‘go there, look at that’. Odds are you wander around with a very small set of screwdrivers at all times, too.
But, as before, WaveShare’s main website is a little stuffed. You’ll have better luck checking one of these out through AliExpress. There, the cheapest version costs R6,900, but SA shipping is blocked. But for the UGV Beast, we’d make a plan with Aramex Global Shopper or something to get it into our hands.
