Kaisar's Pica and Dot Are Ultra-Tiny Fully-Functional Raspberry Pi RP2040-Based Wheeled Robots
Cute little Dot uses wooden beads for wheels and packs almost all of its parts into a footprint the size of a Pimoroni Tiny 2040.
Pseudonymous maker "Kaisar" has showcased what is claimed to be the smallest Raspberry Pi RP2040-based robot in the world: The Dot, which has a footprint barely larger than the Pimoroni Tiny2040 on which it's built.
Kaisar started showing off tiny robots built around Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller, a dual-core Cortex-M0+ part with handy programmable input/output (PIO) capabilities, earlier this month with Pica. Built on a Raspberry Pi Pico development board with the lower section sawn off, the compact robot included two DC motors, wooden bead wheels, and a 70mAh lithium-polymer battery.
The Pica, though, wasn't as small as Kaisar could go. The Dot is, amazingly, smaller still, thanks to a move from the Raspberry Pi Pico to Pimoroni's stamp-size Tiny 2040.
As with its bigger sibling, the Dot features two DC motors linked to the microcontroller's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. A small battery provides the power, and two wooden bead wheels the locomotion — including a zero-degree turning circle.
Kaisar has not released details of the build but has posted additional footage of Dot, Pica, and an earlier build made around the Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computer dubbed CutieBot to Twitter.
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