For years, I’ve learned a lot about kits and how things works. I enjoyed working with Arduino or Raspberry Pi kits and every time I felt very excited when I opened the box and built my first application in minutes. The kit should be able to provide all the components needed to start building stuff right from the box. For this was designed the Pi2Go kit, but with a minus right on the track. It doesn’t include a Raspberry Pi board, but what looks like a deficit for anyone who’s trying to play with Pi, could be an advantage for RPi owners.
Even so, the Pi2Go can be a useful platform for educational and hobbyist purposes, and with a bit of electronics and programming skills, any Pi lovers can transform the kit into a multi-purpose robot on wheels.
Inside the Pi2Go, the engineers put all the experiences collected from BeeBot and Pro Bot Turtle robots. Both robotic kits were designed as educational projects and still are popular in many schools around the world.
Any Raspberry Pi owner has a lot of possibilities to play with, but for those who need an affordable platform with sensors, wheels and motors, I’ll put together six reasons to buy the Pi2Go kit.
1. It has a good price
The price is probably the first criteria to choose or not a kit. The Pi2Go is available at a price around $67, which is fair enough for a wheeled kit with sensors, motors, and wheels. More than that, can be attached to the chassis any of the Raspberry Pi models A, B or B+.
2. Support two ways for power supply
When you have one option, you cannot make a choice. When you have two options, you have at least an alternative. Even is powered with six AA batteries or a plug power supply, the kit supply with power all the components as well as the RPi.
3. No more than 90 minutes for assembling the kit
When in one box you have available almost all you need to build a functional robot, the patience is almost gone. The time between unboxing the kit and the first application with Pi2Go is around 90 minutes, a time when the user should solder and assemble the components.
4. It has a good documentation
Without a strong documentation, even a simple kit can be transformed in a nightmare. This is not the case of Pi2Go. The kit has available a series of tutorials from where any user can start and build the first application.
5. All three Raspberry Pi models are supported
It’s hard to have a Pi model and a kit without proper support. This again is not the case for Pi2Go. The wheeled robot is engineered to host any RPi model including A, B and B Plus.
6. A wide range of applications with two types of sensors
The kit hosts infrared and ultrasonic sensors. With this combination, anyone can build a kit for a wide range of applications. From autonomous navigation to detecting objects or follow a line, the Pi2Go is the right platform.