I know a few teenagers interested in robots, but are not super sold on the blockly drag and drop programming.
Anyone have something slightly more complex, while still being geared toward Teens?
Thank you!
It's a yearly competition and teams build a robot to compete. That robot is usually pretty big (3x3 ft. at the base, usually?). There's a kit of parts that includes a board, and the programming environment is mostly pre-configured for you.
Next year's build season kicks off early January. The stuff these kids can build in a month is pretty amazing.
FIRST has really made our lives more difficult, paving the road to hell with good intentions by using android phones instead of microcontrollers, which required all new hardware of pretty poor quality and a Java software stack that some teams are finding difficult. Our local group has been farmed out around the state to provide support much more often than in years past.
That said, FIRST is probably still the best organization for these kids to learn robotics, and I don't know whether FRC is going to suffer the same hardware and software hurdles as FTC.
They provide a nice platform to get you started, but you still have to do a lot of thinking and clever engineering to get it all built.
The teams I was with did welding and created parts on CNC machines, but that's not necessary. Many teams build their robots out of purchased pre-fabricated parts. That's a much better way of doing things when your team is new.
You get the task the robot is supposed to perform and the rules it needs to follow in January, and you have to build a working robot in about six weeks. Everyone is very busy, and there's a lot of things that go wrong as the thing gets built. Everyone learns a lot from the experience.
[0] http://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/?domainredir=mindstorms...
[1] http://bitsandbricks.no/2014/01/19/getting-started-with-pyth...
I later got into Handyboard+IC, which is even more powerful/hackable.
A better and more up-to-date C implementation for Mindstorms is RobotC: http://robotc.net
I was frustrated by the lack of affordable, expandable walking robots, so I've been working on one of my own
Not for sale yet, but I'm starting to run workshops locally and the plan is to crowdfund in the early spring with a target price of about £70/$100. It'll work standalone but can hold a Raspberry Pi or Arduino for expandability.
I think legged/armed robots can be a lot more engaging than buggy robots, and open up some interesting avenues for creating motions and thinking about multi degree-of-freedom limbs, but things like Robosapian are just toys, and the $400 hobby robots can get boring quickly (e.g. adding a camera is difficult).
If you have access to a 3D printer there are some interesting open source robot projects at the moment - for example Poppy: https://www.poppy-project.org/ for which you can start by just building a torso
The other thing about robotics is that you really need a goal, otherwise people lose interest. The HBRC started the table top challenge which was good for a variety of reasons, 1) it was approachable, 2) it needed only a table top to work, and 3) it had enough complexity (in stages) to keep people challenged. DPRG created a number of challenges as well that were similarly staged.
So first ascertain which of the three disciplines they are most likely to be successful at. And start there. Parallax offers a number of good kits which are easy to program and the Makershed has the Arduino based robots.
Second come up with a goal, an objective that you seek to accomplish. Working toward that will give you the feeling of accomplishment you need to stay interested and feel like you are going somewhere.
Third, decide on your budget and set your scale appropriately. For low budget robotics you can build robots using converted servos for motors that roll around on tables, but for higher budgets you might want to build "Magellen" robots which can navigate around outdoors. If you really want to burn money quickly I suggest starting a battlebots team :-).
If you must spend money on hardware, buy them desktop upgrades, more memory or the fastest processor that'll fit in the socket (may need to upgrade BIOS first...) or a top of the line graphics card.
I think turtles are easy to program, they're in LUA and are a step above blockly type stuff. I kinda like the LUA APIs, they're not ridiculous or anything. They're simple enough that you'll get a chance to build useful larger functions / subroutines.
At least its cheap. If they throw up their hands in frustration at programming their own tunnel mining program, at least you'll find out soon and it'll be cheap. Start with building a robot smart enough to build stairs all the way down to bedrock. Extend to have it place actual stair steps and torches for light, etc.
Note that there's a subtle difference between a future-EE-teen who thinks programming robots is cool and a future-EE-teen who thinks robot hardware is cool (like motor H-bridges and gray code position encoders and sensors and generally melting solder). Obviously the latter is not going to find modded minecraft amusing. There is also the "competition robot" set which usually isn't programmable but amounts to homemade RC cars, you specifically don't want that, just mentioning it as something to look out for and avoid in the market.
I produce Mirobot which is designed to teach kids about everything from the engineering aspects of how it's built to programming it using a number of different methods. It's a drawing robot so you can also use it to learn about geometry and maths.
It's all open source and easy to program because it connects via WiFi which means it can all be controlled via WebSockets in your browser. There are a bunch of apps (http://apps.mirobot.io) which include some drag and drop type apps but also an app to program it with JS. But because it's all just async JSON over WebSockets (or raw sockets) you can program it in any program you like really.
It's Arduino compatible which also means you can dig in at that level too.
Check it out if you're interested: http://mirobot.io (15% off with code: XMAS15)
ROS is great as the code you write for one robot can be used on another one fairly easily. It's also gaining pretty large traction in industry with companies. I find that Raspberry Pi/Arduino route more geared towards hardware. I tried that route myself and lost interest fairly quickly.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me (profile). :)
Register, and use this link to add ebooks to your personal library. I've added several books about Arduino and e.g. Python. You have to login each day, and the book can only be claimed that one day. You don't know what book will be free tomorrow, and yesterday's book is gone.
It's really simple and straightforward construction, but it's also really expandable, and really standardized. The main system board is basically an Arduino with a bunch of additional parts like the motor controllers pre-included. You can drop in XBees for wireless control or what-have you, add Arduino shields, etc. The drive system is a very cheap, standard Tamiya kit as well, so it's very easy to repair/replace damaged parts.
And it's an Arduino, which means you have a programming platform that's pretty simple and exploding in popularity right now.
It lets you add on much more advanced tools to lego robotics by way of arduinos.
Edit: I also want to add that bricktronics is open source!
Check out https://www.pololu.com/product/2510
Vex is definitely the highest quality stuff, you can program in C, and they have tons of competitions using this gear to get involved in.
http://store.irobot.com/education-research-robots/irobot-cre...
www.irobot.com/create
It really sparked my interest in CS. I'm not saying it's the best thing out there, but there certainly is no bullshit GUI...