TheCraftyRobot

Here's the link to drive one if you want👇

It's got big!

So @nowplaythese is underway and we’ve been running a big participatory game design experiment using #Smartibot and #Smartipresence. It all started with a robot and two cardboard tiles we’d made. The first had this inconsiderately designed footway, dropped kerb and door. 🧵

We’re building what will hopefully be an an interesting and fun collaborative installation at @nowplaythese and have made these stickers to give to people who participate.

Then use all these measurements to calculate the efficiency of the motor. Along the way we learn about electrical, kinetic and gravitational potential energy. We figured this might be useful for teachers/homeschoolers so there's a print out version: cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1041…

Next the experiment. We use the crane to lift a full drinks can and measure the current and voltage going into the motor using a multimeter. We also time how long the crane takes to lift the can a fixed distance.

We (mainly Gavriel, here doing work experience) made a tutorial that combines CRAFT AND PHYSICS! It's got instructions to build a fun #Smartibot powered crane and details of an experiment to measure it's efficiency and understand forms of energy⚡️ 🧵 thecraftyrobot.net/blogs/projects…

@tsiolkovsky Hehehe, as it was 2020 maybe that's not that big an achievement but thanks for saying so none the less, and for participating! We had lots of fun running it too.

We ran a remote workshop where participants used #Smartibot to build their own cardboard telepresence robots and then built games around them that we all took turns to play. It worked and the games were diverse and fun. You can read about it: thecraftyrobot.net/blogs/projects…

...or watch a video explaining how it all worked. youtube.com/watch?v=BzxaFt…

We've been playing space pirates with 80s LEGO. We made an app-controlled spaceship by building on top of the #Smartibot Brick Kit. thecraftyrobot.net/collections/sm…

You can also use your brick chassis with our Smartipresence telepresence system, allowing people anywhere in the world to control your robot from their web browser

Once you’ve got a chassis with the Smartibot circuit board, motors and battery box mounted, you can build whatever you want on top with your own bricks, like Tristan and his daughters did here 👇

Did you know you can use #Smartibot to build robots with your favourite plastic bricks? We even sell a Brick Kit to with the bits you need for a basic chassis. Here’s little stop motion video showing how it works. thecraftyrobot.net/collections/sm…

@JoshLachkovic @tristanwatson @WalterIsaacson Arduino offers the most flexibility in terms of what you can make but you’ll need to program it and probably add additional electronic components to build most things with it. Micro:bit has a really great coding environment and you can get expansions that make it more useful 2/2

@JoshLachkovic @tristanwatson @WalterIsaacson Our board is very good if you want to build something that moves and you’re more interested in the mechanical elements, as you can connect up to 14 motors directly to it, and our app makes it really easy to build a custom controller, without needing to code. 1/2

Listening to @WalterIsaacson's Innovators has made me want to build a transistor radio or similar. I never went down that electronics route as a kid, and tbh don't really understand electronics at all. Who's experimented with similar things themselves?