Uncategorized

The 4tronix Really Useless Box for micro:bit – a quick review

by  •  • 0 Comments

Hi everyone. I’ve just returned from my shed where I’ve been putting together the 4tronix Really Useless Box. This is a kit for the micro:bit made out of 7 PCBs, a nice switch and has a servo which tells you “No, you may not open this box!” in no uncertain terms!

The kit comes in an anti-static bag and there are a lot of parts to make the end project. You start out by screwing on mount fittings and then you add the servo to one of the side walls. You then build up the rest of the box around that part. The instructions that are available online are clear enough, although sometimes I did wonder which way round things went. There are a lot of screws in the kit, and sometimes it’s not quite clear which ones go where, but I worked it out based on how many of each there were and didn’t make any mistakes the whole way through, so that must speak to how good the instructions are.

At the end of the build, you are left with a box with a micro:bit as one of the end walls. You flick the switch to open the box and then the servo controls an arm which politely, but resolutely, flicks the switch back again to close the lid. It’s entirely pointless (hence the name), but it is great fun to build. It’s also very good value (at £12) and took me about an hour and a half to put together. You could probably assemble it in a lot less time than I did – maybe 45 minutes – but I was enjoying myself 🙂

It also comes with all the code you need to calibrate the servo and program the full box in Makecode. This means it’s an ideal project for beginners, or for someone who fancies a bit of fun 🙂

You can buy the Really Useless Box from 4tronix. You’ll need to provide your own micro:bit.

Making, micro:bit, Robotics, Tutorials

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

by  •  • 2 Comments

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

by  •  • 0 Comments

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!)

by  •  • 2 Comments

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

by  •  • 2 Comments

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!

by  •  • 3 Comments

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.