Waveshare AlphaBot - DIY Mobile Robot Development Platform Chassis for Raspberry Pi or Arduino Remote Control Mainboard Starter Educational Kit

This product has been out for a couple years, and there are very few reviews for it, so here's one....In one sense, this is your basic 2-wheel + caster robot car. Waveshare makes several versions of this kit, and this is the most basic -- just boards, wheels, motors, hardware, and a few sensors: speed, IR "obstacle," IR "line tracker," and IR remote control. No microcontrollers, no batteries, but otherwise a complete kit.The cool thing about this kit is that it can use either an Arduino Uno or a Raspberry Pi or both!I was interested in using it with a Pi. It worked, but the Pi is attached to an acrylic layer and then sandwiched between that and a PCB layer. They didn't provide any cutouts in the acrylic, so the SD-card is almost impossible to access, and the HDMI is impossible to access. I plan to make some cuts later to fix those issues and add some slots for cooling.More bad news: mine was missing a couple minor parts, like 2 brass stand-offs that are important, but fairly cheap and easy to find elsewhere. I also had difficulty installing the speed sensors. They just didn't fit. Probably because of how the battery holder was attached.The good news: it works, and the design is pretty clever. Even after reading the fairly extensive documentation (PDFs), it wasn't immediately clear how clever. Instead of wires connecting the motors and various sensors to the controller(s), they give you 7 blocks of jumpers. By default, all of the jumpers connect pins to an Arduino, but you just move selected jumpers if you want to connect to a Pi.Example code is also provided which seems to work. Finally, you can leverage a bunch of open source software. In the case of the Pi, that includes video streaming from your car, which is a pretty cool feature.Note that this basic kit does not include a mount for the Pi camera, so you'll either have to make/buy your own or check out the Waveshare upgrade kits that include a servo-based pan/tilt mount.