Mind Mash

Today at around 4pm, a little baby bot was born. Oliver helped me with some of the design decisions, and with measuring and calibrating the little guy. He weighs about 2lb (including batteries), and is 14″ long. At this stage, he is blind. He does, however, diligently follow instructions fed to him as a program down a USB cable. After each programming, we remove the USB cable and he is reborn, newly obedient.

One of the lessons I learned with this robot was that the electronics and programming are at most half the challenge. What caused the most problems was the mechanical part. In the end, I settled for an old iPhone box for the body. We carefully cut holes in the sides for the motors, making the motors fit as snugly as possible to minimize wobble. Even so, a couple of folded pieces of paper and an earplug are used to pack the motors more tightly.

My first little Robot