Need advice on a project I intend to make

Community General Discussions
1

Hey,

I'm new to the robots' business and I would like to hear some thoughts on a project I intend to make.

Two friends and I need to build a robot for a school project (we're studying technonoly amongst other subjects).

I had the idea of building an "open source" robot. By that I mean building a robot for people with only basic knowledge of technology that will be easly programmed by a simple sdk program that we will make as well.

The idea is to build something much like a "multi-tool" robot. It will have a number of tools installed on it (like cameras, lasers, 7 segment displays, mechanic arms and a few more) and the user could program the robot for his needs.. like measuring distances, patrolling the house and sending an sms if there is a movement..and stuff like that.

Since we three are new to makin' robots, we though of building something like Fritsl's first robot from part III (the cup lifter) and perhaps upgrading it a bit.

Well, that's pretty much the idea. What do you think? I will be glad to hear your thoughts and any advice, comment or help is welcome :)

-I hope I opened the thread at the right section :P

Thanks in advance,

Or Efrima

2

Could work
Have you looked at other beginner systems out there? What have yyou considered about how devices are connected?

3

No, I didn’t look at other

No, I didn’t look at other beginner systems. The start here robot was infront of my eyes so I just checked it out and tried to think of ideas…

And what do you mean by how devices are connected?

Thanks for your comment :slight_smile:

4

Directions

Here are a number of beginner robot building systems:

http://www.microbric.com/page.php?sId=3 Microbric Viper

http://www.vexrobotics.com/ Vex system

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/411/Default.aspx Parallax BoEbot

http://www.gearseds.com/ Gears Educational system

http://mindstorms.lego.com/ Lego Mindstorms

Each has a little different approach, but each give good examples of how to build a working robot.

About how devices connect, the Microbric Viper above I believe only has one way in which one module plugs into another, so that there are no polarity reversals, to help keep the smoke in the components. I think the Mindstorms stuff is prettty foolproof too.