Robots and Physical Computing

Microbit Remote Control CBiS Car I wanted to contol the CBiS micro:Bit Car via gestures whilst holding another micro:Bit (see Figure 1) I went for: - Button A in combinat... Coral Dev Board and Raspberry Pi This is the second of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some of the current AI specific add-on processors for Intenet of ... Escape the Maze with a VR robot - Vex VR You don't need to buy a robot to get programming a robot, now there are a range of free and relatively simple to start with robot simula... Crumblebot - explorer bot? In an earlier post I played with 4Tronix's CrumbleBot to make an edge follower robot ( http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/... Programming Robots Virtually 4: Preview of Edbot Studio In previous post I looked at a few on-line robot simulators (see links below) Programming VEX Code Programming  iRobot Simulator Programming... Top read post on Blog in Feb 2020 Popular Posts Moving Eyes with an Adafruit Adabox kit...

Recently I produced a post about playing with Vex Robotics VexCode VR blocks and the Maze Playground. The post finished with me saying I would like to play with Python and do a Python version of it. Well it is actually very easy to do it. You can do it in two stages from the block code. First click on the <> icon (lighted in the figure above and it gives a further view producing Python code that changes as you change the blocks. The last stage is to convert to a text project (button at the bottom right of the screen. Example of the code. myVariable = 0 def when_started1(): global myVariable drivetrain . drive_for ( FORWARD , 100 , MM ) while not down_eye . detect ( RED ): drivetrain . drive_for ( FORWARD , 5 , MM ) if right_bumper . pressed (): drivetrain . drive_for ( REVERSE , 30 , MM ) drivetrain . turn_for ( LEFT , 20 , DEGREES ) drivetrain . drive_for ( FORWARD , 20 , MM ) else : if l...

You don't need to buy a robot to get programming a robot, now there are a range of free and relatively simple to start with robot simulators to play with. Three examples are listed below: - Make code for Lego EV3  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/05/programming-robots-virtually-3-lego-ev3.html   - i Robot simulator  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-2-irobot.html - Vex robotics Vexcode VR   https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   It is the last one of these ( https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexcode-vr ) that is the focus of this post and return to hit, after an earlier discussion in  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   .  Two of the nice things about the package, apart from being free, are it uses a Scratch-like programming language and it provides a ...

For a number of years, I have been playing with robots as a means of developing programming/coding skills with students. The problem is when classes get larger or it is used as part of an assessment there is very rarely enough robots to satisfy all the students  Turner and Hill (2008) . So therefore, the search has been on for a tool that allows robots to be simulated, programmed, ideally web-based, free and simple to use. Lately, a number of interesting tools have arisen. In this series of posts, I am going to look at experimenting with a few of them. In this post, starting by looking at VEXCode VR - available at  https://vr.vex.com/ . VEXcode VR  https://vr.vex.com/   from VEX Robotics ( https://www.vexrobotics.com/ ) is a simulator and programming tool for their Scratch-like programming tool VEXCode - at the time of writing is free. If you can do Scratch this is a nice next stage, consisting of the simulator (playground) and the programming environment (s...