Overview
In this section, you will learn how to calibrate your car’s servos and motors and manually drive your car.
You will be using a notebook named manual_control_lesson inside the units/2.manual_control folder.
Calibrating Your Servos and Motors
When building your car, you should have tried to attach the servos as straight as possible but it is often impossible to get the exact right angles every time. Luckily, there is a notebook that will help you deal with those slight deviations.
The notebook can be accessed either from the manual_control_lesson notebook or by navigating to the calibration/servo_and_motor_calibration.ipynb.
This notebook will allow you to slightly adjust the steering, camera pan, and camera tilt servos as well as the direction of the motors if they are reversed.
Pay close attention to the instructions inside of the servo and motor calibration notebook.
Driving Your Car Manually
Now that your car is calibrated, it is ready for you to start driving. Just like the calibration notebook, there is a notebook that you will use to start the manual control interface.
The notebook can be accessed either from the manual_control_lesson notebook or by navigating to the control/control.ipynb.
This notebook will walk you through starting the manual driving interface and how to actually use the interface.
Congratulations you now have the ability to manually drive your car! Take some time to practice before moving on!
Manual Driving Challenge
Now that you feel comfortable driving your car, take some time to set up a small obstacle course or track in your area. This will be for you (and classmates) to practice your driving even further! Try to add curves and slaloms to make the course interesting and think about what kind of obstacles a real self driving car might encounter.
What’s Next?
Once you feel confident manually driving your car, continue to the next lesson about basic movement, where you’ll learn how to send basic movement commands to your car.