Robots

This is a project I’ve had on the shelf for quite some time (2 years or so), and only just now finished up. Ever since I saw these HEXBUG Battle Spiders, I’ve wanted to tear them apart and supply them with a more capable brain. These Battle Spiders are mechanically really interesting. All the 6 legs are powered with a ...

Dexter Industries have released a new version of their very successful BrickPi, the BrickPi+.  It sports quite a number of improvements over its predecessors: It now plays nice with EV3 sensors, that’s very cool. It has better motor protection by adding a more powerful motor controller chip, which has improved back-EMF and overheating handling. You can keep track of your ...

The people from OpenElectrons have started another Kickstarter Campaign. This time it’s an Arduino based robotics platform called the BumbleeBeeBot. The BumbleBeeBot has already been used in many (afterschool) robotics programs in various schools, so it’s been through a lot of field testing.  Now they’re ready to make it available to anyone who wants to back this project with larger ...

I wrote about the cute wooden robot named Codie a little while back.  Peter Erdei, one of the team members, told me yesterday that their IndieGoGo campaign is now live.  They’re at 22% of $70,000 already (as of the morning of 1 April 2015), not bad for a project that went live less than 24 hours ago! Go check it ...

  Codie is an artisanal robot, hand-crafted from wood.  However, don’t let the old school materials fool you; inside the wooden exterior hides a sophisticated robot.  It sports quite a number of sensors, as well as Bluetooth 4.0, allowing you communicate with it wirelessly. The thing that really caught my eye with Codie was the software.  It is colourful, looks ...

Some of you may remember I posted about my VEX IQ Quadruped a while back.  I now have building instructions for it! They were made by Christopher Richard Smith, who is quite the CAD ninja.  This is what the Quadruped looks like when it is walking: You can download the software here:  [LINK]. You can download the building instructions for it ...

This time it’s not a little robot for educational purposes, but rather a kick-ass looking robotics platform that can even climb stairs!  Before I start going into details, check out the video. This thing looks like it could come straight out of an action movie! It it made up of articulated sections that you can easily exchange.  Here are two ...

My little brother dropped by last weekend, while on his journey through Europe by bike.  So, what’s more fun than playing with robots when it’s raining cats and dogs outside? That’s right, adding cameras to the robots!  I didn’t get any pictures of the robot with the camera on it, but you can see where it was held by the ...

Shane Lewis from SL Interphase mailed me to tell me about a Kickstarter project that they’ve been developing.  You may think it is just another robotics platform but this one is significantly different from the herd (or should I say “swarm”?).  This one doesn’t have a microcontroller but uses an FPGA instead!  So what’s an FPGA then?  Shane explains: Field Programmable Gate ...

A very cool Kickstarter project was brought to my attention this morning, the Edison.  It’s a very small and light robot that has a surprisingly high number of features up its sleeve.  A few of them should be immediately obvious to most: the LEGO compatible pin holes and knobs.  The bottom of the robot has a few strips of LEGO ...