Robots and Physical Computing

PS3 Controller to move a USB Robot Arm Guest Blogger Hiren Mistry, Nuffield Research Placement Student working at the University of Northampton. How to use a PS3 Controller to... Programming Robots Virtually 3: LEGO EV3 In this series of posts, I am going to look at experimenting with a few  tools that allow robots to be simulated, programmed, these are ide... WebVR 5 Playtime: Augmented Reality to display Videos In previous posts ( post 1 , post 2 ) I have raved over the brilliant combination of Mozilla's AFrame and Jerome Etienne's fantastic... Free your Augmented Reality   Dr Scott Turner   Director of  Computing at Canterbury Christ Church University , Kent and a Code Club Volunteer.     Age Range 10-14 ye... Dance Snowman This post discusses a project that I want to play with since finding out the new Microbit V2 has an built in microphone - this is to use the... WebVR 3 Playtime: Augmented Reality I am going to try to persuade you that using A-Fr...

This post discusses a project that I want to play with since finding out the new Microbit V2 has an built in microphone - this is to use the new microbit in combination with a Ryan Walmsley's SnowPi RGB  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanwalmsley/snowpi-rgb-edition to make the snow,man change the LEDs as the music's volume changes via the microphone. First though, thank to you to the fabulous  Rachel @ItsAll_Geek2Me from Microbit Education Foundation for letting me have Microbits to play with. So thehe starting point is the Snowman, essentially following the instructions at snowpi.xyz for setting it up and writing an initial program in makecode for the snowman. If fact the code in this project is a twist on the code found there. You need to use  https://makecode.microbit.org/beta#editor at the time of writing and add the neopixels extension (see snowpi.xyz for more details) Some new blocks in the current beta version of makecode add for the new microbit; incl...

  Dr Scott Turner   Director o f  Computing at Canterbury Christ Church University , Kent  and a Code Club Volunteer.     Age Range 10-14 years     Year Group 5-9 , Code Clubs .     Lesson Type:  Web programming     Objective   How to  use free  web technologies to create  Augmented Reality.     Requirements   A computer capable of accessing  the required software  and ideally has a webcam   Access to AR.JS Stu dio (free)   https://ar-js-org.github.io/studio/   Access to webhosting or  free webhosting sites such as Glitch.com or GitHub   A n image ( png , jpeg, gif), or video (mp4)    (optional) mobile device with a camera and internet access.         Augmented Reality (AR)  is becoming increasing  popular, but often means using proprietary packages such as   Blipp ar  to create  your  own , or ...