I bought this roughly €46 alternative-brick robot kit and immediately went down the wrong rabbit hole: can I control the motor brick from a Pi Zero 2 W instead of the phone app?
The full robot is the HiWEEGO 8081 from the listing. For these first tests I stripped it down to the motor brick and wheels. One wheel has a tyre; the other is a bare rim. So “forward” mostly means spinning. That's on me.
I had GPT-6.1 SOL help with the code. An unofficial iM.Master SDK gave us 21 passing tests and zero movement. First try I'd even left the robot off. Switching it on still didn't fix it.
What finally helped was recording what the actual phone app sends over Bluetooth. It uses a different advertisement format from the SDK and keeps sending neutral between movement commands. After a restart, initialization and roughly four seconds holding neutral, we got forward/STOP working. Then a fixed forward/turn/forward sequence worked too.
The Pi and camera are still on the desk. Mounting them on the build is the next step; this isn't an autonomous robot yet.
My short build diary, including the unsuccessful attempts and the actual movement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzO6bjSUJIE
Unofficial SDK we started with: https://github.com/2alf/iM.Master-SDK