-ORIENTED

RASPIROBOT ROVER KIT
Review
magpi.cc/2i7kJzh
£40 / $48
Above There's not much to build with the
kit and you'll be done very quickly. There
are lots of extra parts, though
hour, although that does include
u trugging to pee o the
protective layer of paper from the
hi nd find the rehrgee
batteries for it.
Tough enough
Once built it’s quite sturdy. The
chassis isn’t large enough to be
bendy and the Raspberry Pi can be
ed firmy enough in pe o it
doent y o. he it o ome
with speed sensors in the form of
timer discs you can attach to the
motor i you wnt to get the etr
sensors to add them. Speaking of
adding sensors, there are plenty
of spots along the chassis to add
them. The front is especially good
or ine nd proimity enor
as well as adding a pan-and-tilt
arm. You’ll have to do the research
youre to figure out how to get
it connected up to the board,
although that’s all part of the fun.
Programming it is very easy,
using the same standard Monk
Makes libraries. The instruction
You can use the button and
LED as a ‘getting started with
GPIO programming’ step
booklet that comes with the robot
also provides some little tutorials
on getting the LED and button
working, as well as programming
the robot for remote control
and autonomy. The ultrasonic
rngefinder o h it in there
so you can start programming
with that as well. The great part
about all these instructions is
that you can combine them to do
ry thing. or empe you
could have the button start a little
mission where it drives towards
the nearest wall and uses the
rngefinder dt to hnge the
colour of the LED as it gets closer.
While a minor spin on the normal
robot kit, it does open up a lot
more types of customisation and
play options that are much simpler
to understand.
We very much like the
RasPiRobot Rover and its kit.
We’ve built a few other similar and
simple robots and while they’re
always quite good, they don’t
uite go the etr mie ie thi.
Not only that, but we can easily
get our perry i o it without
hving to fidde round with tiny
screws to do so. For the price, as
we it n eeent trter it or
kids interested in the Raspberry Pi
and programming electronics.
Last word
A wonderfully put together
piece of kit, the RasPiRobot
Rover is a great intro to
robotics that can also be used
far beyond the beginner level.
raspberrypi.org/magpi February 2017
81