Building an ArduinoBot

After a fantastic visit to the London Science Museum, and seeing the original Turtle robot, I was filled with nostalgia for little robots that can draw. As the son of a teacher I was fortunate because during the school holidays lots of technology got brought home to play with. One of my favourite things was the BBC Turtle robot. ~

Image copyright paulsilver @ flickr

Now that I’ve got children of my own I thought it would be good to let them play with these kind of robots as well so decided to set about making one that others can build too. I’m particularly keen to create something that a teacher could use in their lessons, and which the pupils could build themselves and then program.

Here are my goals for the robot:

• It should be able to draw a line reasonably accurately
• It should be cheap to make
• It should use off the shelf components
• The hardware and software should be open source
• It should be very easy to assemble (requiring no special tools / machines)
• It should be based around the Arduino

I’m going to use this blog to keep track of progress and ideas for this project. I’ll be making all of the outputs available under an open license here once there’s something to show.