Robots and Physical Computing

The last of the posts on the Hug avoider and the 4Tronix's Eggbit 4Tronix's Eggbit (in fact I bought three of them  https://shop.4tronix.co.uk/collections/bbc-micro-bit/products/eggbit-three-pack-special   :-) recently) is a cute add-on for the microbit. In three previous posts I looked at eggbit using microcode to  produce a hug avoider - warns when people at too close. - https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2021/12/hug-avoider-2-4tronix-eggbit.html -  4tronix Eggbit - cute and wearable - hug avoider Hug Avoider 3 - experiments with Python and 4Tronix Eggbit In this post using the buttons and adding (via Microbit V2 with its speaker) simple speech 1. Buttons Pins for the buttons pin8 - Green button pin12 - Red button pin14 - Yellow button pin`6 - Blue button     if pin12.read_digital()==1:         #Red Button         blank_it()     if pin8.read_digital()==1:         #Green but...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

The microbit is a great piece of kit, not least of which because of the range of programming languages and tools that can be used with it - officially JavaScript and Python and but there is also a range of third-party ones. A useful place to look for what languages/tools  are available is  http://microbit.org/code-alternative-editors/ ; listing both official and third-party tools (there was a few I wasn't aware of ). One I was aware and meaning to play with, is the brilliant Edublocks by Josh Lowe ( @ all_about_code ) or more   specifically in this post Edublocks for BBC Micro:bit  ( https://microbit.edublocks.org/ ). Edublocks for the microbit (and Edublocks in general) allows graphical blocks of code, in a similar way to languages such as Scratch, to be dragged and dropped into places. That in itself would be great, but the really useful thing here is though, whilst doing it you are actually producing a Python program (technically in th...

With a bit of time off, I had a chance to play with the Ohbot (see Previous related links below) a little more. My son and I played with trying to find could we get it to say hello if there is a face on camera but otherwise make it move randomly as if it was looking. We based the code on the examples codes that can be found at the OhBot website ( http://ohbot.weebly.com/ ). The video below shows it in action. Previous related posts OhBot Experiment OhBot a social robot 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.