Do-It-Yourself Robotics

PreacherTom writes "Imagine Legos and Erector Sets on crack. The fruit of a collaboration between Lego and the MIT Media Lab, the Toronto-based startup Playful Invention Company is offering the PicoCricket, "a kit of parts that can be used to build an infinite variety of robotic inventions. The kit contains an assortment of pom poms, pipe cleaners, and other craft materials reminiscent of a summer camp art period. It also includes a collection of Lego bricks and electronics: the Cricket "brain" and a motor, colored lights and a soundbox, a digital display, and an infrared beamer that allows the Cricket to communicate with a PC on which kids write the programs that control their invention's behavior. Perhaps the most important parts in the Cricket kit are the four sensors, which detect light, sound, touch, and electrical resistance. "It was lots of fun making things and controlling their action," says Grover Venkatasubramaniam (age 10). "The most fun was programming the robots. It felt like giving life to lifeless bodies.""

Comments

Mindstorms would be better

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If you really want to do some programming of a robot, then Mindstorms is a lot better than this dopey toy. Mindstorms is easy to get going with, yet has significant depth and you can keep learning..... Hit the wall of the Mindstorms UI and you can add Lejos or similar and go to a whole new level of complexity.

Other Robot Kits

[Bones3D_mac]

So far, the Radio Shack/FIRST VEX robotics kits seem to be the most interesting pre-fab robotics kits next to the older Lego MindStorms kits. There are numerous sites that carry add-on parts (sensors, timing gears, etc...) for the VEX kits, as well as the long awaited programming module.

Of course, if you'd rather go the old-school route, you could go looking for Capsela sets and try hacking together a few custom bubble modules to give it some intelligence.