Tutorial 02 — Camera + Phone Control
Raspberry Pi 4 / Raspberry Pi 5
What you’ll build
You’ll add a Pi Camera to your robot car and control it from a phone or laptop over Wi‑Fi. You’ll get a simple web control page (buttons) + live video stream.
Prereq: Tutorial 01 robot car should already drive normally.
Parts you need (add-ons)
- Raspberry Pi Camera (v2 or v3) + ribbon cable
- Pan/Tilt mount (optional) + 2 micro servos (optional)
- Stable Pi power: 5V 3A (Pi 4) or 5V 5A USB‑C (Pi 5) recommended
- Wi‑Fi access (home router or phone hotspot)
Shopping links are embedded in the PDF too.
Step 1 — Enable the camera
- Power off the Pi.
- Connect the camera ribbon cable to the Pi camera port (blue tab faces the Ethernet/USB side on most Pi boards).
- Boot Pi → run:
sudo raspi-config→ enable camera (if shown) → reboot.
Step 2 — Install the simple streaming + control app
Run these commands in Terminal:
sudo apt update sudo apt install -y python3-flask python3-picamera2
Create a folder:
mkdir -p ~/wolfieweb_robot_control
Download the starter code package (included in the PDF):
Option A: Copy/paste from PDF.
Option B: I can generate a ready-to-upload ZIP for the code folder if you want it as a download on the site.
Step 3 — Videos that help
- Search YouTube: “Raspberry Pi camera live stream picamera2”
- Search YouTube: “Flask robot control Raspberry Pi”
- Search YouTube: “Raspberry Pi robot car web control”
(These are stable search phrases so you’re not locked to a single video that might disappear.)