Introducing the Rover 5 Seeeduino/Arduino Robot Kit

Front View

Front View

Well, it’s taken us much longer than we would have liked, but finally, we’re pleased to announce the release of a brand new robot kit based around the popular Rover 5 chassis from Dagu. This robot kit combines the Rover 5 chassis, with a Seeeduino (an Arduino compatible controller board) to give you a complete robot with loads of great features. The kit is easy to assemble, and accessible for beginners, whilst providing the flexibility that more experienced robot builders need to build advanced robotic projects.

We’ve built this kit by combining components that we already sell in our store to create a complete robot. All the components have been selected and tested to ensure that they work well together, and we’ve written a manual describing step by step how to assemble the robot. We’ve also created sample code in the form of a wall following behaviour so that you can get up and running with the robot really quickly.

Back View

Back View

Buying the kit gives you a great saving compared to buying each of the components individually, but even if buying the kit is not for you, because you have some of the components already, we hope that the manual and sample code will provide some useful ideas for your own projects. Check the kit out here, and let us know what you think.

 

 

 

 

New Products

We’ve recently added some new products to our store. First up are a couple of new Arduino shields from Seeed Studio. We now stock their WiFi Shield and their Relay Shield, so now for almost any application, we probably have an Arduino Shield you can use. :)

Secondly, we’re pleased to announce that we now stock the BerryClip from our friends over at Raspberry Pi Spy. The BerryClip is a small affordable electronics kit that is a great project to get started with on the Raspberry Pi. It consists of LEDs, a switch and a buzzer, and provides a perfect introduction to both software and hardware interfacing.

WiFi Shield

WiFi Shield

Relay Shield

Relay Shield

 

berryclip_2013_03_05

BerryClip

 

Sensors

One of the main things missing, from the Dawn Robotics webstore up until now was sensors. Which is a fairly glaring omission when you consider that sensors are a large part of what makes a robot, a robot…

Well, we’ve now fixed the problem, with a range of sensors from Seeed Studio. Your robots can now detect walls and obstacles with the Ultrasonic range sensor, navigate with the 3 axis compass, and follow lines using the IR line sensor. For the full range, see the sensor section here.

Ultrasonic Range Sensor

Ultrasonic Range Sensor

Also, one of the other advantages of getting these sensors, is that it now allows us to put together more complete robot kits (the greyed out coming soon items on our main page). These will be bundles which give you all the parts needed for a complete robot, coupled with a discount for buying everything in one go. Hopefully, this will help save money, and reduce some of the confusion for people just getting into this fascinating hobby.

Line Follower Sensor

Line Follower Sensor

Mobile Robot Bluetooth – Adding Bluetooth to the Dagu Adventure Bot

Mobile robots become much more flexible and fun when you add Bluetooth or some other form of wireless communication to them. You can control them remotely yourself, or connect them to a PC which coordinate the movement of multiple robots, or record data from their sensors.

Now, Dagu’s Adventure Bot is a very versatile robot, and has lots of cool features, but one thing it lacks is wireless control. Well we’re going to put that right, and show you how you can use a Bluetooth module, and the Arduino SoftwareSerial library to get your Dagu Adventure Bot talking wirelessly to your PC and/or your smartphone. We also provide some example code which lets you drive the Adventure Bot around using the most excellent MOBOT BT Car app.

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New Products From Seeed Studio

Seeeduino V3.0 Atmega 328P

motorshield_03

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently become a distributor for Seeed Studio, and as such we now have a brand new range of exciting products that you can use in your robotic projects.

Chief amongst these is the Seeeduino, Seeed Studio’s take on the Arduino, and a number of very useful Arduino Shields. Seeed Studio have really tried to innovate with the Seeeduino, making a number of changes, rather than just blindly ripping off the Arduino design, and as such, it offers a very useful, and affordable controller for your robotic and electronics projects.

That’s not all we have from Seeed Studio though, we have motors, a breadboard power supply and more. So, please, check out the new range, and start planning your next robot. :)

Up and Running

Ok, so the store is now up, along with our forums and this blog and tutorial website. Dawn Robotics is open for business!

You’ll probably notice that things are a bit sparse round here at the moment, but over the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years, we aim to expand things a lot. We’ll be bringing in new products for the store, providing tutorials and news for the robotics community, and generally making this a much more useful site for people interested in learning about, and building robots.

So, watch this space! :)

Adding ‘Bump Navigation’ to a Robot

A small robotRobots need sensors in order to learn about their environment, and typically for mobile robots, this involves adding switches or contact sensors to the outside of the robot in order to work out when it’s hit something. Now this tutorial shows how by using an accelerometer, you can get rid of those sensors!

The Dagu Micro Magician V2 is a very versatile control board. One of its many features is an onboard MMA7361L accelerometer, and this means that it’s possible to use it to build a robot that can respond to obstacles without having to use traditional bump sensors such as microswitches. The basic idea is that a bump can be detected by looking at changes in the accelerations experienced by the robot.

 

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