Jarmil Halamíček's Tortuguita "Little Turtle" Is a Raspberry Pi-Powered Tank-Track Robot Platform

Maker Jarmil Halamíček is working on an open source, highly-hackable tracked robot platform — featuring a Raspberry Pi Zero WH single-board computer as its "brain": the Tortuguita.

"Tortuguita is [an] open source boilerplate rover platform for anyone who want to build something cool and moving, without wasting time by fiddling with motors, drawing PCBs et cetera," Halamíček explains of the device, whose name means "Little Turtle." "It is set of well designed separate modules, which can be easily unmounted, cut down to pieces, modified, hacked, and mounted back."

The heart of the robot is a Raspberry Pi Zero WH single-board computer running Raspberry Pi OS, connected to a Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2. A pair of 12V 25GA-370 geared motors drive independently-controllable tank-like tracks with four doubled road wheels, idler, and sprocket, with power provided by a trio of 18650 lithium-ion cells.

Halamíček has already completed initial hardware design, using a mixture of 3D-printable parts and low-cost plywood to form the robot's body, and at the time of writing had been working on polishing the software stack — a mixture of Python, Flask, React, and Bootstrap, with an application programming interface (API) to make it easy to write your own programs to drive the turtle.

"The control software works fine," Halamíček writes of the project's latest progress, "but the fronted UX [User Experience] was made with a standard hacker's attitude (it's ugly, but it works) and also only for a relatively big screen on my iPad. I'm glad I made a decision to build a simple but powerful enough UX stack from React, Bootstrap and Font Awesome (instead of plain JS [JavaScript] and CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]). The entire time to do all [these] tweaks was a little bit longer than to write this log, but still a piece of cake."

More information on Tortuguita is available on the official website, while kits are available to order from the store at $199 for just the electronics, $299 for everything except the 3D-printable parts, and $399 for a complete kit. Those who want to make their own can find the hardware and software in separate GitLab repositories, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GNU General Public License 3 licenses respectively. Project updates, meanwhile, are being published on Hackaday.io.