Mirobot: An Affordable WiFi Robotics Kit

Mirobot is a very cool open source robotics kit that’s completely open source and very affordable.  When I was contacted by Ben Pirt, the man behind this project, I was admittedly a little skeptical about yet another robotics system.  However, this robotics kit seems very nice and sports some very cool features:

• Super easy to build, it takes just two small bolts to put it together, the rest of the parts fit together like just a jigsaw
• It features actual stepper motors, so you’ll get much more accurate motor movements than with standard motors or continuous rotation servos
• It is programmable over WiFi; it acts like an Access Point, so you simply connect to it with your laptop and away you go
• You can program it it in both Scratch and the standard Arduino programming environment.
• It’s super easy to solder because it’s been designed that way, right from the start

It was inspired by the old-school Logo Turtle robots.  When I was a kit I played with one of those but I never had the pleasure of actually owning one.  I had to rely on other kids’ ones or a simulated one on the screen.  I really love the fact that it’s completely wireless.  I love this video of the Mirobot being programmed using Scratch running on a Raspberry Pi: talk about affordable robotics education!

The project is up on Kickstarter and is garnering quite a lot of interest.  It has shot past its initial pledge target by almost 300% at the time of writing this.  It really is quite a steal at a mere £50 (that’s about €60 or $84 US).  If you pledge now, you should be able to receive your robot around September, so not much of a wait!