Ever wondered how fast are we moving to an era of automation and control. We human beings like things which are in our control, which always obeys us, which is friendly to us and one of the most important things i.e which can take our stress. We never want to carry burden upon ourselves so we usually find ways to pass it to any other object.

So in order to help you by saying a phrase "A friend in need is a Pi-Kart Indeed". Wait what ? Shouldn't it be a friend. Well you heard it right that is Team Pi presents you your shopping buddy 'Pi-Kart' which is under your control, carries your burdens and never even complains. What more could you wish for in a shopping mall where there is so much of hustle and bustle.

Talking about the background of our Idea first, We all know that shopping malls are the place where you carry the burden upon your hands compiling everything on the trolley and then trying to push it harder with your kids. The kids unknowingly travel around the shop with the trolley which brings a pain for their parents.

This makes it much more difficult for people to buy all the goods that they planned to buy since the bag or the trolley becomes heavier and brings discomfort for the shopper to carry around.

So now we know that everything is moving towards autonomous and self-control, we came up with this idea to make a bluetooth controlled Kart which makes it easier for the person to connect with their mobile phones and then control their trolley whenever and wherever they want. Not only do you control your Kart, an electronic device is attached in front of the kart where all you need to do is just hold any of the shopping item in your hand and show it to the electronic device which tends to scan the qrcode of the goods and then further stores it in an excel file which directly displays to the biller at the time of checkout or payment. Firstly, this reduces the amount of time in billing and then you don't need to check again your goods. Secondly, you are making your life easier and faster.

So you wish to know the working then follow me along with the below mentioned points

1. Making a Bluetooth controlled kart requires arduino uno, bluetooth sensor, motor shield, some jumper wires, 2 dc motors, breadboard, some batteries around 6, your mobile phone, some coding and wheels for the movement.
2. Motor Shield - The Motor Shield is a driver module for motors that allows you to use Arduino to control the working speed and direction of the motor.
3. We started with making an app from MIT app inventor to control the movement of the kart using your mobile phone. We added some basic directions which are Forward, Backward, Left and Right. We took help from referring tutorials from RoboIndia.
4. Now we moved on making the structure of the Kart. Using Mechanix frameworks for building up the structure required to follow the basic principles of physics. The mass had to be distributed equally over the surface where the goods had to be kept and then the electronics was to kept at a region of blindspot.
5. For making the base structure, we also started with making a fusion 360 design of the Kart to get an overview of the profile of the Kart.
6. Following this we head to the electronics area where we started of by connecting arduino uno and motor shield first. Using a breadboard for having the bluetooth sensor we connected it with the motor shield such as to make the kart follow the directions which the user taps on his/her device.
7. Now in order to supply the power we used a battery containing 6 cells to power up the arduino uno.
8. So for the code part of arduino, you could head to the file above and have a jist of it.
9. And now to talk about the Qrcode part, we used opencv for this to decode the qrcode present in a good with the help of pyzbar and then further store the names of goods in an excel sheet.
10. The excel sheet is the end term result which is displayed only to the biller in his/her computer.

Pi-Kart is something that becomes a social friend for the customers as shopping mall. It's entirely under the control of the person.

We feel we could go for making it entirely automatic i.e making it a human following Kart. And further we could make it more user friendly by adding the payment transactions then and there only where all you need to show is the receipt when you checkout from the shop.

Swarup Tripathy 😄

Yatharth Agarwal 😄

Anvit Agarwal 👽