Wow, over 5 years since I wrote a blog entry. Seems like yesterday.
Aida, Luis and I bought a programmable robot! I've been looking for a toy robot for some time, wanting to get a writing robot (I used to love turtle graphics on the computer when I was a child - I didn't know it was designed with real drawing turtle robots in mind.) I bought a Mirobot v3 and assembled it with Aida. It didn't work (well, we made it beep, once). That was a shame.
We saw a little robot called Edison. It doesn't draw, unfortunately (though you could hack-it in). It was really cheap, for a robot. It's programmable with a number of different sensors, lights, buttons and 2 drive motors for the wheels. Programs are loaded via a stereo-jack cable that get converted into light and read underneath the robot. The programs are compiled into wav files. It's an ingenious data transfer method that I haven't seen before.
The robot looks like this:
Below is the first program we wrote. It's called Zackaboomba.
The iterations on coding it were interesting. The bugs were:
- We didn't realise the numbers below the drive blocks (blue) were measured in seconds. We had the robot turning right for 90 seconds at one point (I presumed it was measured in degrees);
- The robot almost ran off the table because of a bug in the loop (it drove forward for 2 seconds instead of 1). That was funny. Made me think of some of the errors that rocket engineers working for NASA do (similar level of complexity);
Below is a video of Zackaboomba in operation.
I think we're going to have quite a bit of fun making Edison do things. Some other things about the robot:
- It takes 4 AAA batteries;
- You can attach lego to the top and the wheels (there were squeals when little lego people started spinning round-and-around);
- It can drive over and read bar-codes to load pre-programmed routines. This will be great when the children just want to reset it back to one of the more game-orientated programs (such as obstacle avoidance);
I still want a drawing robot. Here is my shortlist (in order of preference):
- Root Robot (not out yet but maybe soon)
- Open Source Turtle Robot (OSTR)
- Valiant Roamer (history)
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