GiftBot: a Raspberry Pi Robot That Delivers Christmas Gifts

In this project, we’ll show you GiftBot, the Raspberry Pi Robot that will deliver your Christmas Gifts and bring cheer to your holiday season. We took the GoPiGo Raspberry Pi Robot, added some Jingle Bell Rock with the Raspberry Pi Speaker, and harnessed the power of three reindeer to deliver our gifts this year. A elf will ride on the GoPiGo as it makes its rounds.

No reindeer robot would be complete without a Red Nosed Rudolf: we added one with a Red Grove LED!

For this project, we’ll use the following materials:

• GoPiGo Raspberry Pi Robot – GiftBot’s power and finesse!
• The Raspberry Pi – The brains of the operation.
• Speaker for the Raspberry Pi – We’ll play some festive Christmas music!
• Red Grove LED – We’ll add a red nose to Rudolf with the Red Grove LED.
• Various LEGO Technic parts – We’ll make the reindeer harness out of LEGO parts.
• Elf on a Shelf – The elf rides the GoPiGo, along for the delivery.
• Manila Folder Cardstock – We’ll print the reindeer directly on the card and cut them out.

First, we’ll assemble the GoPiGo.

You can find assembly instructions and videos here. This should take less than 30 minutes to put together. We attached speakers on the top of the GoPiGo with a zip tie.

Next, we’ll print and cut out our reindeer.

We’ll need a picture of a reindeer to get going. You can click on the stencil below for a larger version. All credit goes to “FreeStencilGallery.com” for the image!

We got nice stiff deer by cutting down a few manila folders and feeding them into our laser printer.

We cut out the reindeer and colored them in brown with some crayons to give them that real-life reindeer look.

Next, we’ll build our reindeer harness.

The GoPiGo has holes that are perfectly spaced for LEGO Technic beams and parts, so we built the harness for the reindeer out of LEGO Technic.

We squeezed the reindeer between two LEGO beams, and linked them together, attaching the harness to the front of the GoPiGo chassis.

Rudolf needed a reindeer nose. So we added one. We strung two Grove cables together to connect the front of Rudolf with the GoPiGo. We used jumpers to add some length, connecting the black and yellow lines of the Grove cable. We attached the LED to the analog port, and we tied the LED to the LEGO frame with a zip tie.

You can get the code here. You can download this directly your Raspberry Pi Robot with the following command in terminal:

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DexterInd/GoPiGo/master/Projects/GiftBot/deer.py

To run the program, we just type:

sudo python deer.py

And away we go!

Feel free to ask on our forums! Be sure to check out our other projects with the GoPiGo!