11–20 of 103 posts
This setup gives you pretty much all the possibilities of Mindstorms at a small fraction of the investment
Doing something similar at home is very possible, and if you are nearby an existing team or program they are usually more than happy to have a conversation with parents about how to get their kids started even if it doesn't mean joining the team.
An iPhone app is used to teleoperate the arm and gather examples of an action. You then train the model and deploy it and the arm performs the actions based on current camera input and joint angle state.
You might learn Fusion if you want to 3D model the chassis - again, everything is on Youtube.
Good luck!
Maybe buy Lego Mindstorms and Lego Technics for home and when the kid runs out of ideas, give them challenges like a line-following robot or a FLL course.
Then move to a FreeNove Ultimate Sarter Kit. I prefer the Arduino Uno based kits, but the ESP32 kits have their place as well.
I was going to recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms but is is discontinued. In terms of easy of build and programming these were great. This kit is still available https://education.lego.com/en-us/products/lego-education-spi...
There are rumors that Lego is working on a future Mindstorm system. Haven’t heard any hard news about it though.
It's a FOSS robotics software toolkit; you can model the entire robot and simulate nearly every aspect (including physics and servos and whatnot). Using it you can design, test, print, and assemble in a relatively nice fashion.
I mostly use BowlerStudio for 3D printing CAD stuff, but it does a lot, and since it's free I think it's worth playing with.
A few words of advice from someone who has been dabbling for a decade or so, but never really managed more than some half baked prototypes and a few kit builds. You need to consider these three trade offs: time, skill, and money.
Time: If you have a lot of time, you can learn what you need to learn to build a robot. Learn 3d modeling/printing to make a chassis (my local library has a 3d printer if you don't want to buy one). Learn how to piece together microcontrollers, motor controllers, BMS, and sensors, etc... And learn how to program everything to work together.
Skill: If you already are pretty good building things, programming, etc... you can leverage those skills. For a robot chassis, it can be done with things around your house, but you need to have the skills and a bit of creativity to make a good one. If you know the arduino ecosystem pretty well, you can pretty easily put together a prototype board, etc...
Money: You can buy a prebuilt chassis, or a board that has integrated motor controllers and BMS, etc... This will save you time and you will probably end up with a nicer end product than what you could build yourself. Of course the more you lean into this, the closer you are getting to a kit build robot. And FWIW, a kit robot is probably going to be cheaper than mixing and matching prebuilt components + some DIY.
Also, it kinda depends on what you want to do. Do you just want a little robot that drives around the house (cheap and easy). Or maybe does some line following (also easy). Or do you want a self-balancing robot, or a robot arm (a bit harder and more money). Or something really fancy like a self landing model rocket or a self driving lawn mower (expensive and difficult). You will probably want to start with the easy stuff first, just so you can get a feel for it. And then move up the difficulty ladder from there. But from my experience the time/skill/money trade off goes up fairly exponentially. Getting a half baked prototype for a simple rover is a weekend long project. But doing something really sophisticated or polished is months/years of effort (unless you want to drop some coin to speed things up). It is a fun hobby, but it does require a bit of investment before you start getting impressive results. If you think you and your kid are up for it, then dive right in. But if you think this might be more of a short term curiosity, then a kit or something similar is probably your best bet.
[1] https://shop.teamwitchdoctor.com/products/camp-witch-doctor