Home Robotics

Maker-Inspired Projects For Building Your Own Robots

Daniel Knox

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781781317686
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Robotics
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Learn to make your own robots with this accessible, illustrated guide for robotics enthusiasts, featuring 13 unique robotics projects suitable for beginner to intermediate level. You've seen the sci-fi movies and dreamed of creating your very own robot. Now learn to build machines with your own hands that will move or perform tasks at your command. Featuring brand-new projects and specially commissioned photography, this book uses easily sourced components to teach you simple electronics and programming. Learn to design and build your very own custom-made creations that can walk, draw or even guard your home. Start with a space-age butterfly that skips along on its own or a robot that creates psychedelic patterns of amazing variety, then discover how to create a catapult bot that activates when movement is detected or construct an intelligent, all-terrain rover vehicle – the possibilities are endless.

02 SIMPLE ROBOTS

AVATAR

SCUTTLE BOT

GARDEN GUARDIAN

CATAPULT BOT

WALKING ROBOT

Using the BBC micro:bit to provide the brains for these cool projects, you will soon learn how to adapt the ideas to dream up your own brilliant robot designs.

AVATAR

Our previous projects all used simple mechanical and electrical components to allow our robots to move and interact with their environments. However, more complicated robots commonly use small devices known as microcontrollers.

COMPONENTS

1 BBC micro:bit

TOOLS

PC/laptop computer

micro USB cable

SNAPSHOT

Microcontrollers give robots more advanced functionality. They are like small mini computers. While they’re not very good for familiar tasks like browsing the internet, they are excellent at doing or monitoring things repeatedly – they are brilliant at this because they can perform these tasks extremely quickly.

Microcontrollers need to be programmed for them to be able to know what tasks they should perform. Programming is commonly done using something that looks a bit like a strange text language, but this is not very user-friendly for new roboticists. Instead we will use a graphical programming language where we can build programs by dragging and dropping ‘blocks’ onto a screen.

If you have ever used the programming language ‘Scratch’ at home or at school, you should feel confident about the programming part of these projects. If not, don’t worry as this project is all about guiding you through writing your first program.

1 Launch the JavaScript Blocks Editor from the micro:bit website (microbit.org). When it loads, you should see a pane with a picture of a micro:bit, a number of tabs that contain different kinds of blocks, and a pane which contains two blocks ‘on start’ and ‘forever’. The ‘on start’ block, like its name suggests, performs tasks that should happen when your micro:bit is first switched on – this block is useful for setting the initial state of things. The ‘forever’ block repeatedly executes the same tasks over and over again as fast as the microcontroller can go. This is why microcontrollers are great at doing simple tasks repetitively.

2 Click on the ‘Basic’ blocks tab and drag a ‘show icon’ block onto the pane with the ‘on start’ and ‘forever’ blocks. You will notice that the ‘show icon’ block has a little notch in the top part of it, this means that it needs to be connected to something in order to work. Drag and release the ‘show icon’ block so that the notch connects to ‘on start’ block. If you have speakers plugged into your computer, you should hear a ‘click’ sound. The pane with a picture of a micro:bit should now change to show an image of a heart. This pane simulates the running of your program and is useful to test things without having to keep downloading your program to your micro:bit. Click the heart icon that’s currently on display in the ‘show icon’ block and click on the happy face. You should see that the simulator now updates itself and instead of showing a heart, it is instead displaying a happy face.

3 Frequently when programming we need our program...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 01 Basic Bots
• 02 Simple Robots
• 03 Smart Makes
• Resources
• Index
• Copyright