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Robotics/Electronics Class - How Would You Do It?
MainerDood asks: "I have been teaching programming and networking at the high school and collegiate levels for several years, and now I am branching out into electronics and robotics for my high school students. I am keen on Linux and Open Source solutions where feasible, and would like to avoid using pre-packaged robotics/electronic 'kits' (ie: Lego Mindstorm). I have a minimal budget, like to tinker and have access to tons of old PCs... I would like to use them in these projects and buy the 'parts' where needed. I am envisioning an order of breadboards, diodes, resistors, etc. but not sure from where I should order, what a good basic startup setup should contain and resources I should refer too. I have found a bunch of links online and various resources, but I am curious to know how you would go about this... seasoned veterans and electronics/robotics enthusiasts - I am all ears!"
Take a look at Physical Computing. It's sub-titled "Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers" and features instructions and projects for basic work wiht sensors and simple chips like the PIC and BX-24. (Full disclosure: The authors are colleagues of mine at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.)
I see your point, but disagree with you. My High School electronics teacher was teaching us robotics. He essentially was working on his own projects but teaching us what to do why and how and having us do the dirty work. I learned enough in my first year to know I wanted to be an EE. I of course decided to major in alcohol and eventually dropped out to work in IT (hmmm correlation there?).
I don't remember enough of what we did to be of any use to the discussion though. I graduated in '93. I DO remember that we had 2 386 motherboards ( I remember thinking "I will NEVER need more power than that"), and some prepackaged gear sets. We could program in several thousand instructions for the Robot to follow. Sadly, it was a 2 year long project and I graduated before I could see the thing in action, but it can and has been done before.
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Considering High School Students that "wouldn't comprehend most of the stuff"
2) To get the materials you need for your class, go to the nearest homeless guy and ask him for his electronics parts.
3) Try to find the last guy in town who is still in the "electronics repair" "business" and ask him for parts. His sunken eyes in his emaciated cheekbones will light up with the prospect of some food, maybe some money.
Several of my professors have been teaching robotics classes to students for years. Before I explain their opinions, I should inform you that they are Computer Science professors, and their slant is toward programming robots.
Basically, their theory is that building robots is difficult work, and most of the students wound up spending more time cutting, welding and soldiering than programming. The Lego mindstorms kit (with a firmware hack so we can use Not Quite C) proved very useful for programming the lego robots to do various things. There's still plenty of room to learn about various mechanical and electrical systems with mindstorms, but you don't have to worry about dorking around with soldiering, which is a pretty risky business with the hot iron, nasty fumes and toxic chemicals. I've seen more than a few mindstorms hacks onto their electrical systems to add stuff. The one problem is that they're probably pretty expensive, even with a qualified academic discount.
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Open Source Sysadmin
Coming from many years in programming I've recently been learning about hardware. Being of a lazy disposition I needed to quickly and cheaply build up a large stock of components. Nothing I hate more than not having a part on hand.
I picked up a breadboard locally and that was the last item I bought retail. Everything else came off ebay at ridiculous prices. The problem for me was usually I ended up with too many items.
The best thing about the cost is that I'm not afraid to break things. That burning smell doesn't mean I've blown $10 more like 10c.
For robotics you can go with the latest pic/stamp + prgrammer. But think simple, Z80 + EEPROM + SRAM gives you the same sort of thing at a much reduced price. For instance I picked up 100+ Z80 chips for less than $10.
Decide which controller you're going to use, I'd suggest Z80/6502 etc for cost reasons, but the low end pics are very reasonable as well. Once you have that decided, there are numerous emulators etc available for Linux for each controller. Cheap serial burner can be built for pennies, make that the first class. Kids hate theory.
Build the course around the controller and only delve into theory briefly. Show how to build a drive controller, light/ir/sound detector etc etc. Make one class cover a topic. Give weblinks so the interested kids can follow up in there own time.
I had a robotics class in high school last year and it was rather fun. We used http://handyboard.com/ Handyboards for the brains of most of the robots we made. They aren't like mindstorms in that a bit of work is still required to use different servers and motors with it. The handyboards are programmed with IC which is Interactive C. IC is somewhat open source and has a linux version so we used it. The only downside is that they are rather pricy at $200 a unit. Some other robots we made were simple touch sensor robots using breadboards and servos(Servo motors are nice you should get lots of them as they can be used for just about everything!). This project came from a book called 'Mobile Robotics'. For another project we got an old floppy and cdrom drive and had to make a robot to win a race with them. Everything had to come from the floppy and cdrom drive all the wire/motors/switchs we only got tools to work with. This project was the most fun and likely the easiest for the teacher to manage as he didn't need to provide parts. You could do variations or even make the project more complex. One thing that helped a lot is that we started out working on simple projects and at a slow pace so that everyone in the class could participate regardless of having had an electronics course before. We often built robots in stages where we would make a robot with a touch sensor first and then go back and add light sensors and so on.
Microcontrollers are an excellent bridge between code and hardware - you can code in C but your I/O is actually CMOS digital I/O which can then be plugged up to whatever digital devices or auxiliary chips you want.
Seconded! Forget the combination of diodes, resistors and old PCs and get some Atmel AVR prototyping boards and set up a C programming environment for them on a Linux PC. Then get a bunch of cheap RC servos - these are very versatile and very easy to control from a MCU. Then some leds, switches of different kinds, and sensors (light, sound). You can whip up all sorts of stuff from these in no time and learn a ton in the process.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?