Ask Slashdot: How To Begin Simple Robotics As a Hobby?

First time accepted submitter nedko.m writes "I would describe myself as more of a 'software guy' rather than somebody who likes to play with hardware much, but I've wanted to start doing basic robotics projects as a hobby for quite a while now. However, I was never sure where to start from and what the very first steps should be in order to get more familiar with the hardware aspects of robotics. For instance, I would like to start off with a simple soccer robot. Any suggestions on what low-budget parts should I obtain, which would provide me, subsequently, extensibility to a bit more elaborate projects?"

Comments

I would NOT second this

[Anonymous Coward]

Bought one for my son and learned it to be an assistant coach for his middle school robotics team, and have been disappointed with it. My primary problems with it were:

1) Limited to 3 motors at once, and 2 are usually taken for steering if you want a robot that can move/turn, which means you're limited to 1 for anything else you want it to do (the EV3 may have more than 3, not sure).
2) The "programming" is kid-friendly (consisting of a visible block you can drag-n-drop for each line of code) but the UI is kinda messed up and very unfriendly to anyone who knows they could write the lines of code 10-50 times faster.
3) The math part of the "programming" only supports integer math, and some versions only support 16-bit integers. There's no way to tell the robot "move X millimeters forward" (only turn the motor a number of degrees), and if you know how to use PI and the wheel radius to figure it out, you can't use 3.14159 in an integer-only program. Sure there are ways around that, but the "block" aspect of it makes it a major pain in the ass.

If you're not a programmer, it might be a decent primer to get you started. If you are a programmer, I predict that it will frustrate the heck out of you.