Short Project Description


Short Project Description


The concept of graphical programming enables teenagers and even younger children with creative access to computers. Scratch, a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, provides not only the tool, but creates also a very inspiring environment for children, teachers and parents alike.
But sometimes creativity goes beyond creating "only" a program - physical interaction, tangible results become essential.

On the other hand, the Arduino project is quite famous and I'm impressed how well documented these microcontroller boards are, how easy they are to come by and how many slightly modified clones are around - all of them (Arduinos and clones) with a reasonable price tag. So it seems a good idea bringing Scratch and Arduino together.

This blog describes the advances step by step of setting up a robot controlled by an Arduino and easily programmed through a graphical enviroment. This project might be interesting to hobbyists, teachers, educators and parents (like me).

To allow for a maximum of creativity and flexibility the robot will use LEGO Technic / Education as the mechanical robotics platform.

Monday, 17 February 2014

Alive - Lego Robot on the Run

The most important message at the very beginning: This project is very alive - even without me finding time to blog...

My son is really happy programming his Arduino (in fact an Arduinio clone: ITeaduino BT as described in my blog from October 2013) with S4A.

At the very beginning, he worked through the excellent documentation Elisava Workshop Materials 2011 provided from Citilab. This gave him the knowledge and the confidence to start setting up his "ArduBot" entirely built from the LEGO Technic set 9390 and some special parts, I've already described.

ArduBot - from the side
A permanent bluetooth connection allows "remote controlling" of the robot's actuators and sensors with S4A. This really works fine - and I really dont understand, why this way of connecting to an Arduino is not much more widespread.
Modified microservos to act as continuous rotation servos move ArduBot, IR sensors prevent it from collisions, whereas an ultrasonic sensor (like the famous PING!) provide a long distance detection of obstacles (not mounted on the picture above) and small IR sensors allow the implementation of a "line follower".

ArduBot - from front angle
What we learnt from the modification of our microservos is a different story, enough to fill another blog as well as construction details of our new tech toy...




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2 comments:

  1. joblog18 February 2014 at 05:21

    Great work. Really appreciate it, although I'm sure not as much as your son does.

    One question, assuming your laptop is talking to the bluetooth receiver on the arduino board are there any extra steps required to run scratch? Anything you wouldn't already have to do with a USB connection?

    Looking forward to hearing more.

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    Replies
    1. Unknown19 February 2014 at 12:46

      Taking a recap on Bluetooth configuration, I remembered myself, I did quite a bit of things. So I decided to give the answer as post in my blog ...
      As I've performed that task some time ago, it took me quite a while to remember everything and some things I had to retrace. Next time I'll write it up as a blog post at once ;-)

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