In my on going quest to get a camera working on a robot car and failing with an Arducam, I cam across an existing kit that has an add on extra of a camera. It is the:

ACEBOTT ESP32 Smart Car Starter Kit with Mecanum Wheel

with

ACEBOTT ESP32 Camera Expansion pack for Smart Car

which is going to make achieving my goal much, much easier.

To get the Smart car working you’ll need to nuy some batteries:

1 x CR2025 for the Infra Red Controller

2 x 18650 to the motors and controller board

Assembling the car is pretty straight forward and the kit give you a few spare items for those that you invariably drop on the floor and lose, which is nice. The main challenge I had was with the wiriing. It is always a good idea of take a photo of the components , both sides, BEFORE you assemble them so you can read the pin settings. Case in point, here is the Ultrasonic senor after I had to disassemble it to get the pin settings.

Hopefully, that saves someone else having to do same.

Here are some more I took of the motor shield board because reading the numbers for the connectors was challenging.

With everything finally assembled and powered up I wanted to wire some code to test all the sensors were working correctly. I used this for my tests:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Acebott/Smartcar/diag.cpp

It will flash the LEDs, move the servo for the ultrasonic sensor, test the IR receiver, play tunes on the buzzer and test all the wheels, forwards and backwards for you.

All teh driver files and the instructions can be downloaded here. This will give you everything you need for all the Smartcar kits and add ons.

My next step will be to code the Smartcar so that it moves in response to commands sent to it via the Infra Red controller. Stay tunes.