Robots and Physical Computing

The OhBot company has recently released a slightly different version to their OhBot - Picoh ( https://www.ohbot.co.uk/picoh.html ); a cute small robot head. This is a just a short post about some initial playing with the Picoh OhBot. Windows I started playing the windows based blocks (see below) programming used for programming the ohbot. Very scratch-like language but packed with lots of features. The program that loads automatically takes you through loads of the features . Python I wanted to know if I can use it with a Mac as well. The blocks are not available for a Mac but a Python-based approach is ( https://www.ohbot.co.uk/picoh-for-python.html ) . Set-up instructions are good, starting from the GitHub site  https://github.com/ohbot/picoh-python , the README file is useful including links to setting up for a Mac and links to example programs. Thonny is my prefered IDE for running Python in this case - just for the ease of use really. Mainly I have pla...

I have recently taken two robots to a Code Club, here are a couple of reflections/observations. Cozmo This robot produced by Anki is incredibly cute - a cross between Wall-E and a pet in some respects. The code below was produced by the 'Code-Clubbers' and gets Cozmo to speak move around and operate its forks at the front. Anecdotally, someone was trying to work on something but couldn't resist coming and having another look at what it was doing. Ohbot Ohbot provided a different opportunity to play with a robot, getting to move the mouth, speak and track faces. My first impression was some of the children were a bit wary, until they found out they could control what it says and that seemed to break the ice. All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Sometimes what I do as job can have some major personal pluses (I get to play with robots some of the time), one of these has been the opportunity to introduce people to social robots, and recently I have been lucky enough to managed to do this four times-   twice to my own computing students, but also to groups of primary school children in two events (see below).  Apart from it's what I enjoyed doing; the social robots we are starting to see are great, but there is so much more that could be done. Who is going to develop this - possibly one of these children? Why not? It has taken nearly 40 years to get from R2D2 on the screen to some of the social robots we are seeing launched now, in another 40 years we might have something as bright as R2D2 (R2D2 was always brighter than C3PO) . Why wouldn't one or more of these bright children or one of the students I teach, be the ones to contribute to this? They have the enthusiasm, with the changes in the National Curriculum in...

The blog has been going less than a year (first post was 15th July 2015) but I thought the statistics about the blog so far might be of interest. The Top Ten posts based on page views: mbots - graphical programming and Arduino 22 Jul 2015,  716 It is a good time to play with little robots 14 Nov 2015,  401 Raspberry Pi gesture controlled Minecraft X-Wing 3 Jan 2016,  395 Scratch Robot Arm 23 Jul 2015,  385 OhBot Experiment 13 Aug 2015,  323 Experience at Raspberry Pi Cademy 7-8th December 2... 12 Dec 2015,  318 Raspberry Pi Controlled robot from junk 19 Jul 2015,  301 Playing with Tickle and Mini-drone 4 Aug 2015,  300 ...