Making, micro:bit, Robotics, Tutorials

Building your first robot with the micro:bit – a new tutorial from @raspibotics

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Getting started with robotics is always tricky. For Raspberry Pi robotics, I always point people at the Pi Wars Hints and Tips guide. For micro:bit, however, you might find this guide a great place to start to build the robot pictured above. It uses a micro:bit, obviously, and the Kitronik Motor Controller together with two micro metal gear motors and a ball caster as the guts of the robot. It then uses a second micro:bit as the controller for the robot, operating over radio to issue commands to the receiver onboard the robot.

You can read the entire guide here and see a video of the robot working below:

Bizarre, Making

Entirely useless keyboard made by inserting floppies uses a Raspberry Pi and a Teensy LC

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Foone Turing (follow him on Twitter here) has done some crazy builds in the past but this time he’s gone for… entirely useless!

He’s hooked up an old floppy drive to a Raspberry Pi which reads the disk insertion events and then looks to see what the volume label is: the volume labels are letters or special keys like SHIFT. These are then sent to a Teensy LC which converts the signals into proper keystrokes which it then sends to a host PC. It’s completely batty, but I love it! Talk about whimsical 🙂 You can see it in action below:

Thanks to Hackaday for spotting this one.

Pi Wars, Robotics

Building a quadruped robot using a Raspberry Pi 4 (and approx $900!)

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A group of students at the Stanford University Student Robotics group have developed a lightweight, open source quadruped robot design. They’ve called it the Pupper and it runs from a Raspberry Pi 4. The cost for the Pupper is between $600 and $900, depending on the quantities involved. The best part of it is that they have extensively documented the build process over on their website. From there, you can find a bill of materials, build instructions, CAD models and PCB designs and they have released all the code necessary on GitHub. A quick video of the Pupper is below:

If walking robots is your thing, you might also be interested in one of this year’s Pi Wars entrants: Spot Puppy, designed and built by Josh and Jeremy Pattman which you can see below. I know which I think is cuter :p

 

micro:bit, Reviews, Shopping

Review of the Kitronik Inventor’s Kit for the micro:bit by Tony Goodhew

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Tony Goodhew has done an extensive, exhaustive and detailed review of the Inventor’s Kit for micro:bit from Kitronik over on the Element 14 website.

The kit contains everything you need to get going with the micro:bit including a base board to place things on and a pin expanded board to allow you to access all the GPIO pins of the micro:bit. It comes with a motor, a buzzer, LEDs, buttons, all kinds of good things.

You can read the review here.

You can buy the kit from Element 14 or, indeed, from Kitronik themselves.

Education, micro:bit, Shopping, Tutorials

My very first micro:bit post – a work-in-progress resources page!

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Here goes… my first micro:bit post. 🙂

I asked on Twitter whether there were any blogs out there for the micro:bit. I was sent a few links to various different sites (although, curiously, very few with an RSS feed that would help me track changes/new stuff easily!).

I’ve collected everything I’ve found so far onto this page. This is just the start – I expect to add to it as I go along, so feel free to contact me if there are any resources that are particularly good. What I’m not going to do is to replicate, in its entirety, Carlos’ excellent work over on GitHub. He’s got a huge head-start on me, so I’ll just link there for now.

micro:bit, Personal

Changing the name of my blog – broadening out to a wider audience

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Hi everyone – hope you’re well in these weird, difficult times.

Over the past few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that many of the people who are interested in the Raspberry Pi are also interested in other single board computers, in particular the BBC micro:bit, a micro-controller that has become very popular in the UK. In order to allow myself to blog about both Pi and micro:bit news and projects, I’ve changed the branding on my blog to include the micro:bit.

My first love will always be the Raspberry Pi: I owe it and the Raspberry Pi Foundation so much in terms of my learning, my friendship group and my hobbies. However, there are times when I think that a micro:bit is the better answer, particularly when it comes to those first steps into computing. Please note: I am not saying that the Pi in any way has issues in terms of what it sets out to do, and the way it does it; just that sometimes a family or child just wants to plug something into their laptop and “get on with it” rather than burn an SD card and come to terms with the finer points of Linux/Raspbian.

I guess what I’m saying is: There is room for both, and there is a point to both.

That explains the change in name and header image, I hope! This blog is now called “Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base”. I like a bit of alliteration! 🙂

I’m also planning on blogging a little more than in recent months. I’ve had to re-evaluate how I spend my time – there are plenty of projects I’d like to get on with, house stuff, family stuff, theatre stuff. It all takes time. But there is room for blogging, too, and I do enjoy it!

Until next time!