29 Apr 2014

Raspberry Pi, Scratch and Mirobot

One of the things that people asked me during the fantastic Maker Faire UK last weekend was whether Mirobot would work with Scratch and the Raspberry Pi. This is hugely appealing for many reasons, but one that particularly appeals to me is the similarity to the early days of computing in schools. I've always said that one of the big influences for Mirobot was the BBC Turtle, which worked with the BBC Micro computer.

Old and new

Educational robotics, old and new

There's something really nice about using the modern equivalents to update robotics in schools for the 21st century and using the Raspberry Pi, Mirobot ...

Read more
03 Apr 2014

An Update

I've not blogged here for a little while, primarily because I've had my head down preparing to launch Mirobot on Kickstarter. However, I've still made some good progress in a few areas that I thought it would be worth updating on.

I've been experimenting with different chassis materials and have found some nice melamine faced MDF that I think looks good. The black edges contrast really well. It required a bit of cleaning but I'm hoping that I can tweak the laser cutting process to reduce this. It's fine for small volumes, but if the Kickstarter is successful then I'll need to make sure this proc ...

Read more
03 Feb 2014

Open Source PCB

Open Hardware

In the previous post I open sourced the chassis designs and this time it's the turn of the PCB.

The PCBs are designed in Eagle CAD and you can download the schematics and board designs from the GitHub repository if you want to modify or improve them. Alternatively, I've also packaged up the Gerber files for this first public release here. You can send these off to somewhere like Ragworm to get them made.

Read more
22 Jan 2014

Open Source Chassis

Open Hardware

This project has always been about building an open source robot, but until now the physical hardware was not actually open source, only some of the arduino libraries I had written to drive it. I'm proud to announce a new GitHub repository (https://github.com/bjpirt/mirobot-chassis) which contains the CAD files for making the chassis. You can take these and cut your own now should you feel that way inclined. The easiest way if you don't have your own laser cutter is probably to use Razor Lab - there's a file already laid out to send to them.

I'm waiting for what should be the final version of the ...

Read more