The $268 Waveshare PiRacer Pro (Waveshare, Amazon) is my favorite ready-to-run Donkeycar autonomous car, at least as far as the hardware goes. But it comes with badly outdated software, which is no longer supported by the Donkeycar project. So when you get one, the first thing you’re going to want to do is load the latest Donkeycar, which works great on that hardware.
Here are some tips on doing that.
First, install the latest RaspberryPi OS on the SD card, following these instructions.
Once you’ve done that, SSH into the Pi and after you’ve updated the OS (“sudo apt update", “sudo apt upgrade"), make sure you enable I2C using "sudo raspi-config").
Then you can you create the Donkeycar app by following these instructions.
Before you can run Donkeycar, you need to customize some settings in the myconfig.py file in your mycar directory.
Enable the OLED screen by uncommenting this line and setting it to True (note that the OLED will only show text when you’re running Donkeycar, which you’ll do later when you’re ready to drive with “python manage.py drive“).
Enable the game controller that comes with the car by uncommenting and setting the Use Joystick as Default to True if is not already.
It will default to Xbox mode. To ensure that your gamepad is in Xbox mode, hold the Home button for 7 seconds after powering it on
That’s it! Your Waveshare car should be ready to train and race like any other Donkeycar. Return to the docs to learn how to do that.