Posted 28 June 2026

When I work on significant projects like the vision-enhanced robot project, I generally hold two different but related mental maps for the overall project.

One map describes the physical and/or logical entities that are needed for the overall project to succeed, such as wheel odometers, battery packs, power regulation/distribution, the OAKD-Lite camera, the pi5, wheel motors and drivers, etc.

The second mental map describes the software (here the term ‘software’ includes both the pi5 software and related teensy firmware) pieces needed to give the robot the ability to do what we want, primarily the enhanced navigation possible with vision processing via the OAKD-Lite camera and associated software. This mental map (at least for me) seems to be project oriented, where each project addresses different, mostly independent software capability implementations (Wifi_OTA, with its precursor projects ‘SerialPassthroughDemo’, Wifi_OTA_Demo, etc).

I tend to work on a big project like this from the top (system-view) and bottom (small sub-projects that will be later integrated into the overall project) at the same time. I have learned over the years that creating (and later modifying as needed) a clear top-down system architecture is absolutely crucial to improving the chances of getting someplace that looks like where you wanted to go. This systems architecture is the ‘aspirational view’ (to borrow a modern Elon-ism) of the project’s long-term goal. In the case of the vision-enhanced robot (VER), the goal is similar to the one for my 4-wheel robot, i.e. “Autonomous navigation around our home”. However, instead of ‘wall-following’ as the 4-wheel robot did, this project will utilize vision processing at the primary navigation technology.

Over the last few weeks, Grok Code and I have been working at the bottom of the systems architecture with things like getting OTA updates for Teensy firmware working, both via the PC -> Bluetooth -> HC-05 -> Teensy Serial channel and most recently, via the PC -> Wifi -> Pi5 -> Teensy Serial channel. After (mostly) getting the Wifi_OTA capability going, I decided it was time to stop and make sure we had a Git Repo structure consistent with the top-down view. After the requisite amount of fumbling around, we (me and Grok Code) came up with the following structure.

my_vision_robot/
├── .gitignore
├── README.md
├── docs/ ← Overall project documentation
│
├── hardware/ ← Schematics, BOMs, mechanical (future)
│
├── shared/ ← Code used by multiple projects
│ ├── firmware/ ← Shared Teensy code/libraries
│ └── software/ ← Shared Pi5 Python modules
│
├── software/
│ ├── SerialPassthroughDemo/
│ │ ├── README.md
│ │ ├── pi5/
│ │ ├── teensy/
│ │ └── docs/
│ │
│ ├── Wifi_OTA/
│ │ ├── Wifi_OTA.py
│ │ ├── README.md
│ │ ├── pi5/ (if needed later)
│ │ ├── teensy/
│ │ └── docs/
│ │
│ └── Vision_Navigation/ ← Future main vision project
│ ├── pi5/
│ ├── teensy/
│ └── docs/
│
├── tests/ ← System/integration tests
└── tools/ ← General one-off utilities

Now the challenge is to move all my sub-project files from our current quite-messy repo structure into this one. Standby!