The Sequoia Robotics Club started a few months ago. Our first project is a simple bot that will move forward until it bumps into something, backs up, turns, and continues on its way. There were a couple of reasons to choose this simple bot as a first project:
- Demonstrate all the fundamental elements of a bot. By keeping it simple, we can focus on the basics.
- Give everyone a chance to make mistakes as cheaply as possible. When your learning to solder you are bound to fry a board or two. It's a lot better to fry a $15 board than a board that's part of a $100 kit ...
- Make members feel comfortable with stuff we've designed ourselves, rather than kits designed by others. I worried that if the first project we worked on was a robot kit from someone else, that we'd be reluctant to put together a design of our own. Better to start with our own right off that bat.
The bot is put together from a few simple components. It wasn't as cheap as I'd like, but well worth the cost for a simple bot that demonstrates all the basics!
We our Solarbotics stuff locally from
Hobby Engineering.
I expect that our next bot will be a Solarbotics "sumovore" with an atmel board. We'll see ...
