Learning Simple Robot Programming With a 'Non-Threatening' Robot Ball (Video)

Gobot, it says here, "is a framework for robotics, physical computing, and the Internet of Things, written in the Go programming language." And in today's video, interviewee Adrian Zankich (AKA "Serious Programming Guy at The Hybrid Group") says that an unadorned robot ball -- in this case the Sphero -- is about the least threatening robot you can possibly use to teach entry-level robot programming. Start with Go language? Cylon.js? Use whichever you prefer, Adrian says. Mix and match. It's all fun, and they're both great ways to get into programming for robotics and Internet of Things applications. Open source? You bet. Here's the Hybrid Group's gobot GitHub repository for your perusing pleasure. This (and more) is all in the video, which Tim Lord shot at the recent Solid Conference, where there was a rather high background noise level (but thankfully not high enough to make Adrian hard to understand). And besides the video, there's even more material in the transcript.

Comments

The sphero site is fact free

[Required Snark]

This seemed amusing, so I thought I would go over and check out the hardware and see what it could do. I wondered if it had any sensors.

Turns out that any technical information is completely buried. They have a whole bunch of cool pix, and lots of stuff they want to sell you, but if you want to find out what it can do then they are silent.

This leads me to the conclusion that it is more likely then not hype and marketing. Anyone who is proud of what they build will make it easy to get the specs and API info. They must figure that they can move a lot of merchandize because ROBOTS!!!

1 Sell it to the parents.

2 Let it sit on the shelf.

3 Profit!

Don't waste you time of this.