NEW PRODUCT – Parallax BOEBot Robot for Arduino Kit (Board of Education). We are very excited about this one! This kit brings the excellent design and tutorials of Parallax to the Arduino world. Make your Arduino the onboard brain of a mobile robot and learn robotics, electronics, and programming with this versatile kit and its accompanying step-by-step lessons. The Board of Education Shield plugs into your own Arduino (not included) and mounts on the popular Boe-Bot robot chassis.
With this kit and your own Arduino module, you can follow the Robotics with the Board of Education Shield for Arduino lessons with over 40 hands-on activities.
Learning to program your robot’s Arduino Brain
Calibrating the robot’s continuous rotation servo motors
Using lights and speakers for status indicators
Assembling the robot
Preprogrammed navigation
Using touch-switches to navigate by contact with objects
Using phototransistors to navigate by light
Using non-contact infrared sensors to measure distance and avoid or follow objects
The original Robotics with the Boe-Bot text for the BASIC Stamp microcontroller has enjoyed worldwide popularity with teachers and hobbyists, and has been translated into seven languages. Author Andy Lindsay revised his work for the Arduino community, and Parallax Inc. is making it available as a free, online tutorial at http://learn.parallax.com/ShieldRobot.
Kit Contents:
Board of Education Shield PCB
High-quality aluminum robot chassis, continuous rotation servos, and wheels
Boe-Boost Module
All the electronic components and sensors needed for the Robotics activities
All the assembly hardware needed (nuts, screws standoffs)
Parallax Screwdriver
Please note: Arduino + USB cable not included! We suggest picking up an Uno + USB cable to complete the kit if you don’t have one at home already.
Never risk a squirt of grapefruit juice in the eye again, thanks to Kevin Martin and Hyundo Reiner. The two created this automatic grapefruit slicer as a final project for their Designing with Microcontrollers class at Cornell University. The device is controlled with an ATmega644 microcontroller and uses a flex sensor to map the segments within the fruit so that the cutting blade cuts along the segment walls while the fruit is turned below the blade. Be sure to check out the incredibly detailed documentation for the project, complete with schematics, source code, and a thank you to their local supermarket for donating the grapefruit.
When Richard Garriott de Cayeux threw a costume party the night before his wedding in Paris, his 82-year-old mother dressed up as an Indian princess and attended as a robot.
Helen Mary Garriott wasn’t strong enough to make the long trip from her home in Las Vegas. So Mr. Garriott de Cayeux went looking for alternatives. The one he hit upon was a portable robot about the size of a canister vacuum cleaner with a telescoping neck, binocular-shaped eyes and a screen for a forehead.
More people are using telepresence robots that allow humans to be right there — even when they’re far away. WSJ’s Andy Jordan checks out one San Francisco space with a regular office mate in Brussels.
The staff at his Austin, Texas, computer games company Portalarium Inc. tested it out, then shipped it off to the wedding. And, voilà!, his mother was in Paris—virtually.
…we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 (RDS 4) which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft Robotics website. It was just over five months ago that we announced the availability of RDS 4 Beta and since then, the Microsoft Robotics team has been hard at work putting the final touches on RDS 4 to give developers access to the software they need to build robotics applications… our own team has been using RDS 4 for a while now and we’ve come up with a few cool and unique applications. Check out the video of the Kinect Follow Me robot which was created by our team.
Upon becoming the father to triplets, filmmaker Avi Zev Weider explores the nature of technology. Woven together with expert interviews and portraits of people who have intimate relationships with technology, “Welcome To The Machine” takes the conversation away from the business of technology or the latest gadgets and leads the audience to ultimately consider questions of life and death, revealing that all discussions about technology are really about what it means to be human.
In this episode of Waterloo Labs we show you how we combined an XBox Kinect, an Arduino, LabVIEW and an off the shelf Etch-a-Sketch to make the Kinect-a-Sketch. This system allows you to control the Etch-a-Sketch just by standing in front of the Kinect. You can you a gigantic pencil or even just your hand.
When researchers at the University of Washington created a new version of Raven, their robotic surgical assistant, they allowed the bots to work with open-source code and sent out Raven IIs to research labs around the country. Here’s what happened…
It took a few round, and I went down a few dead ends, but today I finally managed to make a flying paper robot. Originally, I started out with a flying sphere design copied wholesale from the JDM Flying Sphere. Eventually I figured out that I didn’t know thefirst damn thing about making a flying robot and that it would probably make a bit of sense to try and build one that had been successfully flown by more than one other person working for the Japanese military. So, I decided to build a quadcopter. A few people have built those, and it looked like a simpler problem.
Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.
With Ava, left, iRobot is trying to do Rosey the Robot of “The Jetsons” one better. Ava will have an iPad or Androidtablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around.
Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.”
Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. But no apron, so far.
‘ve been tracking venture capital (VC) funding of robotics companies for the better part of two years. Based on my (limited) data, VC funding in robotics exceeded $160 Million for 2011. This is just a rounding error compared to VC funding of Internet (web-based) companies, which hit a decade-long high of $6.9 Billion in 2011. My hope is that robotics will get more love in the next year(s), but getting VC funding for robotics is a decidedly tough nut to crack. Robotics companies have large capital requirements for robot hardware, few potential acquirers, and almost no “Google-scale” breakout success stories (ie. IPOs). I mean, c’mon… one of the best known robotics companies, iRobot, has a market cap of just $700 Million. This makes robotics a difficult sell to your typical VC firm. My hope is that this list can give others courage to pursue “swing for the fences” type projects along with a source for robotics-friendly VC firms.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. On Wednesday, Feb. 29, Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP Lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design. He also debuted a video of the lab’s quadrotors doing something they have never done before…
Hi Adabot and LadyAda, I just completed my StorageBot project for the Instructables ShopBot contest. It uses robotic technologies to help locate parts in bins using a very unique approach. You basically speak to the StorageBot and it “spits out” the parts you are looking for. I used a lot of common parts from the DIY community like stepper motors, a servo, an Arduino compatible processor and 3 meters of the addressable light strip from Adafruit. My favorite part of the project was a 10 minute video demoing the StorageBot but also explaining the significance of why we Makers build things.
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