Building a wall avoider with Raspberry Pi Pico

Two distance sensors and independent motor control with some code are the ingredients needed to avoid obstacles. Let’s start by putting the distance sensors in the shared robot library.

Preparing the robot library

Like we have with other aspects of the robot, we’ll start by building the distance sensors set up in the robot.py file. At the top of this file, the imports now include busio and adafruit_vl53l1x libraries:

import board
import pwmio
import pio_encoder
import busio
import adafruit_vl53l1x

We can then set up our left and right distance sensors. Insert the following below the encoder setup and above the stop function:

i2c0 = busio.I2C(sda=board.GP0, scl=board.GP1)
i2c1 = busio.I2C(sda=board.GP2, scl=board.GP3)
left_distance = adafruit_vl53l1x.VL53L1X(i2c0)
right_distance = adafruit_vl53l1x.VL53L1X(i2c1)

Save this file and be sure to upload it to the CIRCUITPY volume.

We will use robot.py in the...