My 8 year old wants to enter a robot into the tech fair coming up but it has to run off of a computer program. We was wanting to make it out of house hold items but did not know what electrical parts we needed to get or how we would program it. If anyone has any tips that would be awesome!
Welcome to LMR! You can
Welcome to LMR!
You can make bots out of old toys, finds at the dump, etc. You really need to know a lot about electronics to be able to reuse what you find though. I am always recycling and reusing to make pieces of my bots.
I have a 17 year old son who is into robotics and I started at about 10 years old. I started him off by buying some robot kits that he could put together. All of the pieces come together so you don’t end up having to reorder a few pieces of hardware you forgot about and you end up with a real robot. Our benefactors, www.robotshop.com have an incredible selection of different robot kits of all sorts of difficulty to choose from.
That said, in retrospect, I wish I had sprung for the Lego Mindstorms since it all comes in one box and if the kid wants to add an arm or another wheel, they can without using a shop and all of those dangers of losing fingers etc. It is a big chunk of change up front, but I have spent a lot more in the long run buying it all piecemeal as I have.
Good luck no matter what you do. Make sure you publish what you guys do here. I can’t tell you how much fun my son and I have had over the years doing this together. Enjoy and treasure that time with your son.
Regards,
Bill
Thanks so much for your
Thanks so much for your reply and all the information. He just got finished making a Hydroelectricity science project using a water wheel and he is so excited about the tech fair that is coming up.
We were wanting to build the form of the robot out of household products like legos pieces but we did not know if there was a electrical component kit that we need to get to go into the home made robot. I was googling it and there are so many different options, I just did not know which would be the best for a young starter. All the kits I found are for the whole robot but we were just needing to buy the electrical and programming part of it.
Once again thank you for your time.
Check out parallax.com for
Check out parallax.com for programmable robot ideas. Very helpful with lots of great forum folks.