Cannybots, who are a regular at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam, have been working on their product for 18 months now. During that time, they’ve gone through several iterations of the product and introduced it to several schools in prototype form. The Cannybot is a motorised car that comes in a plastic body and is packed with features, the major one of which is line follower sensors allowing it to zip around courses at high speed. It is programmable via Bluetooth and supports a whole range of modes allowing you to use it to drive speed courses, take part in sumo and jousting, navigate mazes, among others.
Today, they have launched their Kickstarter campaign. I won’t go into all the pledge levels here, but they start from $89 for a single Cannybot (Earlybird price) and go up into the lower stratosphere for the larger and more customised packages. Here is their campaign video:
There is a wealth of information on Cannybots on the Kickstarter page so head over there to read all about it. Most importantly for us lovers of the Raspberry Pi, they have developed support for the Pi so that it can be programmed from any language that has ‘sockets’. This includes Scratch, Python and even Sonic Pi. They have created a Python library for programming the robot and all you need is a Bluetooth dongle to connect to the Cannybot. More information on how it ties into the Pi can be found here.
They’ve clearly worked very hard on this product so, if you’d like to have motorised cars driving all over your living room or classroom, take a look!
