Redbot: Assembly

Over the weekend, I assembled the Redbot Robot kit using the instructions on the Sparkfun Tutorial site.

Overall, the instructions were good and the kit went together without any major issues.

Next steps are to upload the code to make it act as a line-follower. I will cover that in the next post.

Redbot Robot Build: Unboxing

I recently purchased a Sparkfun Redbot Kit from Littlebird Electronics. This is a simple two wheel robot chassis that comes with everything you need to build a simple line-following robot.

The reason for this purchase was my 7 year old sons' interest in robots and hope to be able to introduce him to simple electronics and programming using this kit. My 9 year old daughter has also recently been using Scratch to create programs so this may interest her.

The kit consist of the Magician Chassis, a Redbot MainBoard and a variety of sensors (IR and Accelerometer).

The Redbot Mainboard  is a Arduino compatible microcontroller which also includes a 2 channel motor-driver and an XBEE header.It can be programmed using the standard Arduino IDE and Sparkfun includes a link to a library that simplifies the interface with the motors and sensors.

Redbot Mainboard and Sensors

Motors, Wheels and Castor

Redbot Chassis

Over the next couple of posts I will document the build process and any issues I encounter with either assembly of the chassis or programming the robot to perform line-following.