Marty the Robot – Programmable walking robot for kids(indiegogo.com) |
Marty the Robot – Programmable walking robot for kids(indiegogo.com) |
Fun fact, back in March I had the pleasure to share the stage with a handful of Martys at the Edinburgh International Science Festival dancing away...
Marty looks great, backed. Looking forward to playing robots in 2017!
We're planning (read: really want to but might not have time to do everything initially) to target a wide range of programming environments, with Scratch as a really basic level; This would make Marty a kinda smart toy, being able to do logo-like things but not much more. The more complex approaches will of course allow a lot more to be done with Marty.
The control board itself is going to have a fair amount of smarts, with an ARM cortex M4 - but that'll be running our firmware, so playing with that would require somewhat in-depth mbed experience. We'd expect most people to use the i2c or serial interface to hack with Marty, by writing their own code on a microcontroller, RasPi or BeagleBone, and packing that in with our board. As it's all open source, adding to the firmware will be possible, just not the most beginner friendly thing.
As for the WiFi functionality, we're looking at the ESP8266, (not final but unlikely to change) and building a C++, Python and ROS (http://ros.org, serious robotics stuff, very cool) set of APIs to use with Marty.
tl:dr; Two types of control, _standalone_ with an added raspi/arduino/other microcontroller, and _wifi-connected_ to a program running on a computer (scratch, python, C++...)
What would you like to know in particular?
Edit:
To add more generic info, as it is shown in the video we have quite a few prototypes and we are now working on the final design of each piece of hardware (including the control board).
I read the description (did not watch video) and wanted to know more about the actual hardware (chip used, GPIO, power consumption, etc).
Project look great, btw. :)
Still very alpha, specs currently are STM32F446RE (ARM M4), ESP8266 (WiFi, for control from a computer, phone...) and an accelerometer on-board. 9 channel servo control with current sensing, JTAG/USB for programming, i2c and serial interface for talking to it from an arduino, raspberry pi or other microcontroller. We're not expecting to have much GPIO free, and as I said, the firmware it's running is kinda complex, so we're not expecting most people to change it.
How many degrees of side-to-side motion can the frame take before it falls down? I'm thinking of getting two of these, putting a touchscreen on each one, and having them play joust. The objective would be to touch a dot displayed on the other players touchscreen. The things I come up with...
By side-side motion I'm guessing you mean a tipping force - and the the answer would be that he's pretty hard to shove over, at the limit of his lean he's stable, 10 degrees tilt and he'll fall. From fully upright, you need a bit more of a shove - having just pushed one over. Sandy says they can tip themselves if you wobble fast enough.
We're guessing you were thinking of something like this --> http://i.imgur.com/Cmmwu5A.jpg
I appreciate the answers. Best of luck with the project!
