Build a smart robot with this step-by-step tutorial for using the Robotics Shield Kit from Parallax and your own Ardunio Uno, Duemilanove, or Mega.
Teaching robotics in a school or club? Check out each Chapter Summary to see what STEM skills and concepts your students will soak up.
Even though the Propeller chip can play WAV files and synthesize speech, sometimes a simple beep is all the noise you need to get the job done.
The first breadboard circuit we'll build for the ActivityBot is a simple piezo speaker.
It is very easy to make this speaker beep with a single line of code:
Robots have been in use for all kinds of manufacturing and in all manner of exploration vehicles—and in many science fiction films—for a long time. The word ‘robot’ first appeared in a Czechoslovakian satirical play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, by Karel Capek back in 1920! Robots in this play tended to be human-like, and much science fiction that followed involved these robots trying to fit into society and make sense out of human emotions.
The Propeller microcontroller has 32 input/output pins, or I/O pins, labeled P0 through P31. The Propeller can interact with other circuits connected to these I/O pins, through programs that use these labels. A Propeller I/O pin can do three things:
To do the activities in this tutorial, you will need both software and software.
There are two hardware kit options for building a Parallax Shield-Bot.
This tutorial shows you how build an IR Beacon that your ActivityBot can seek, using BlocklyProp graphical programming.
This chapter covered BOE Shield-Bot assembly and testing. Assembly involved both mechanical construction and circuit-building, and testing used some new programming concepts. Here are the highlights:
Hardware Setup
Electronics
Your Activity Board has two built-in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) near the bottom-right corner of the board. They are already electrically connected to Propeller I/O pins P26 and P27. These LEDs are helpful when developing applications that use sensors. The idea is to build a program that turns on an LED when a sensor is activated. Then you, the roboticist, can get a quick visual cue that the sensor is actually detecting something.
