If you give me a bit I'll upload a newer version that's a bit cleaner/supports more things. You can also set up web streaming so you can make a little remote controlled camera. You wanna roughly do the following: 1. get your bittle working/calibrated with the regular serial module. should be in the instructions/videos that come with the kit. 2. solder in the raspberry pi connector. I'm using a zero w and it's enough horsepower 3. get a camera but note if you're using pi zero you need the special cable that's smaller at one end. 4. on raspberry pi, install git (you can find instructions) 5. clone the opencat repository 6. drop the code above in the serialMaster directory 7. install some video streaming - I found this works pretty well 8. keep a terminal open to the raspberry pi and run the python program that reads the keys 9. watch it on the browser There's a slight delay (under a sec) but I navigated around the couch from another room, etc. Pretty neat. Not at all stealth. You can also buy a battery holder and some beefy batteries that will last you hours, but it's a bit more involved project to add a connector - I found that bittle is powerful enough to lug them around, and you can velcro/rubber band them to the underside in place of the original battery, easily. The steps above assume a lot of stuff - like you know how to set a raspberry pi, etc. so depending on your knowledge you'll have to chase down a bunch of other instructions, let me know if you need more help.

@Rongzhong Li Thanks for the reply! Minor inconvenience, I'd rather the energy go in making the gaits more stable! when is that deep carpet walk mode coming :) I'll try to debug a bit more during the weekend and maybe propose a fix.

I think found my problem. in OpenCat.ino, line 632 you have: if (strcmp(newCmd, "") && strcmp(newCmd, lastCmd) ) { but the treatment is inconsistent for skills. Balance, specifically, writes something else in lastCmd even though it's a skill. Check out line 711: strcpy(lastCmd, "balance"); So that strips the "k", meaning you can send "kbalance" in a row, whereas if you send other skills like crawl forward, etc. it gets ignored. Makes sense I guess if you're on a remote that keeps sending the same command over and over again, you don't want to restart the sequence. Somehow - haven't finished tracing all the code (like around line 650), if you have a sequence over serial like "kcrF" -> "kbalance" -> "kcrF", the second "kcrF" will get eaten. Would be nice to document the state machine explicitly, clean it up a bit and break up the code into more functions - but I can't complain, it works and wouldn't have wrote it myself, so here we are.

Re: RPI-zero, the idea is that gaits/skills (like running) are under the bittle board control, and yes instead of receiving high-level commands like "run forward" from the IR, the board gets them from the RPI, over the serial port. I'm playing with something similar - take a look at this post, maybe you can help too: https://www.petoi.com/forum/software/driving-bittle-from-raspberry-pi It works but not reliably. You can drop/run that code in the serialMaster folder.

I wrote the following short program to try things out easily: #!/usr/bin/python import datetime import sys import tty import termios from ardSerial import wrapper # read a single character on a unix system # https://exceptionshub.com/python-read-a-single-character-from-the-user.html def read_unix(count): ch = sys.stdin.read(count) return ch fd = sys.stdin.fileno() old_settings = termios.tcgetattr(fd) tty.setraw(fd) wrapper(['g',2]) wrapper(['kbalance',2]) while True: char = read_unix(1) if char == "q": break elif char == "a": wrapper(['kcrL',1]) elif char == "s": wrapper(['bk',1]) elif char == "d": wrapper(['kcrR',1]) elif char == "w": wrapper(['kcrF',1]) termios.tcsetattr(fd, termios.TCSADRAIN, old_settings) wrapper(['d',2]) I definitely get the log of the commands sent by ardSerial - and the balance/turn off commands work reliably, but the move skills do not - sometimes they work, sometimes the command gets ignored.