u/Misha_Bear_962

Years ago I was mentoring an FRC team when I asked one of the students why there were no new kids joining. He said no one was studying robotics in the middle school. I thought about that and decided they must be scared or intimidated by doing robots. Afraid they might break something expensive or hurt someone like the car-making robots. Or that they wouldn't understand and look like an idiot. That you have to have a PHD, work for a robotics company, or be a rocket scientist to work on robots. I am some of all three, plus an FRC mentor, so I decided to come up with a less scary, less intimidating robot. One with a VERY open platform so you can see all the parts. Breadboards pad-per-hole and solderless to add semi-permanent parts and any circuit/ components you want, room to drill holes to mount new things like IR object detection, lever switches, ultrasonic for mazes, ultrasonic detectors for range finding, servos, utlrasonic on servo for room mapping, accel/gyro/mag sensor, clock, 11 plus 16 channel PWM, place to mount 5 axis robotic arm, any sensor(s) you can interface. All connected to an Arduino Due. I am still building my prototype (my fourth version), documenting the build to make step by step construction guide, shopping list for per robot, per 10 pack of robots, per school tools and test equipment. Student instruction guide for over 30 Lesson Plans with history/over view, Theory of operation, Hypotheses to support Theories, Experiments to support Hypotheses, work from simplest to most advance and end with hints of more experiments and search phrases to learn more on your own. Teachers Guide. How to test a robot that might be broken. How to repair a broken one. Or just back to Build Your Own. Currently it looks like a it over $200 US from Amazon for most items, $120 each in batches of 10, or about half that from Alibaba. I think it was down to $75 each in batches of 10 from Alibaba. Plus my own little Manifesto. When I am done, if there is any interest, giving out all files freely to any who wants them, maybe post on Zenodo as well.

Mike

I hope you find the following stories as enjoyable to read as they were for me to live them so long ago, and now 20 years later to relive them as I remembered them to retell those stories and then to finally write them down. All the stories are true to the best that I can remember them. The time that they occurred is much more approximate. They need no embellishing, no fictional stories added, no gilding the lily. It was just the kind of dog he was. The kind of dog he was born to be, the kind of dog he grew up to be with my care and tutelage, the kind of dog he grew to be with all the love and care he received from such a huge number of other people, the kind of dog who grew to have an uncountable number of close friends. The kind of dog who changed and reshaped my life almost as much as he let me guide and shape his.

https://preview.redd.it/wo1fdeqaxtvg1.png?width=1250&format=png&auto=webp&s=daf96f82d4bed7619d5e166245c7710c7e0fb008