Camp wrap-up - IP STEM Workshops

Camp wrap-up

Time: 12:15 PM to 12:30 PM

Each student shares:

One thing the robot did this week that surprised you
One question you still have about AI

Facilitator close

“You built something that sees, hears, thinks, and moves. You understand how it works at every layer — from the I2C bus to the API call to the system prompt. Most people who use AI daily have no idea how any of it functions. You do. That puts you ahead of 99% of people talking about AI right now.”

Final activity: the goodbye message

Write a goodbye message that the robot speaks aloud. This is the last code you run all week.

sudo python3 -c "
import os
message = input('  Type your goodbye message: ')
safe = message.replace(\"'\", \"'\\\\''\")
os.system(f\"espeak --stdout -s 140 '{safe}' 2>/dev/null | paplay 2>/dev/null\")
print('  Robot said goodbye!')
"

Or if you want to get fancy, open Python and write a multi-line farewell:

import os

def speak(text):
    safe = text.replace("'", "'\\''")
    os.system(f"espeak --stdout -s 140 '{safe}' 2>/dev/null | paplay 2>/dev/null")

speak("Thank you for an amazing week.")
speak("I learned to see, hear, think, and move.")
speak("I am PiCar X, and I will miss you.")
speak("Goodbye, and keep building cool things!")

The week in review

Here is everything you accomplished, day by day:

Day	What you built
Day 1	Flashed SD card, connected via SSH, calibrated servos, validated all sensors
Day 2	Movement programs, keyboard driving, text-to-speech, line following, color detection, face tracking
Day 3	LLM concepts, OpenAI API, speech-to-text, voice chatbot, LLM-controlled robot with tool calls
Day 4	Vision language models, camera-to-VLM pipeline, vision chatbot, vision-triggered tool calls
Day 5	AI ethics, data privacy, robot reporter project, continued learning resources

Detailed week recap — every skill you learned

Day 1: Setup and Calibration

Flashed Raspberry Pi OS with Pi Imager
Connected via SSH over the network
Ran the full setup script (robot-hat, vilib, picar-x, espeak, I2S audio)
Calibrated steering, pan, and tilt servos
Validated ultrasonic, grayscale, servos, motors, camera, battery, and speaker

Day 2: Code and Computer Vision

Learned the PiCar-X movement API (forward, backward, steering)
Built a movement demo from scratch
Built a keyboard-controlled driving program
Explored espeak text-to-speech (voices, speeds, pitches)
Built a talking driver (TTS + movement combined)
Built a line-following program using grayscale sensors
Built color detection using OpenCV
Built face tracking using Haar cascades

Day 3: GenAI and Cloud LLMs

Understood tokens, training, inference, temperature, and context windows
Learned what tool calling is and why it matters
Connected to the OpenAI API and tested GPT-4o-mini
Tested Vosk offline speech-to-text
Built a voice chatbot (STT → LLM → TTS)
Built an LLM-controlled robot with 10 tools
Customized system prompts and wake words

Day 4: Vision AI

Understood how VLMs process images alongside text
Captured camera frames and sent them to GPT-4o-mini vision
Built a vision chatbot that describes what it sees
Added describe_surroundings as a tool the LLM can call
Built the full vision robot: sees, hears, thinks, speaks, and acts

Day 5: AI Ethics and Final Project

Discussed bias, hallucination, and AI-generated misinformation
Examined surveillance risks using the same tech stack you built
Understood data privacy implications of cloud API usage
Built the robot reporter: autonomous tour with VLM narration
Explored career paths and continued learning resources

The five layers of your robot

Each layer built on the one before it. By the end, your robot had all five — the same architecture used in autonomous vehicles, warehouse robots, and AI research labs.

Congratulations on completing the Introduction to GenAI and LLMs workshop. You now have hands-on experience with the full stack of modern AI — from soldering connections to system prompts to ethical implications. Keep building.

Resources and what's nextFree courses, hands-on platforms, newsletters, open-source tools, and career paths to continue your AI and robotics journey.