While Arduino and Raspberry Pi dominate, there are other boards out there for robot builders.
One of the best for rapid robot development is IoTiny from EZ-Robot.
EZ-Robot is a robotics platform for Windows by some smart people based out of Calgary, Canada.
Even though EZ-Robot is a sophisticated, true robotics platform, with built-in AI-style features, such as computer vision and voice recognition, it also easy to use, so is ideal for maker kids, plus has had a huge on school STEM curriculums.
I have two kits from EZ-Robot, a rover (which Ollie Cat loves)
… and a developer’s kit.
These kits came with the full-sized EZ-B board. The IoTiny is a cut-down board (as the name suggests), but it is still fully featured.
You might remember my super-annoying bitcoin price announcer?
That could just as easily have been done with the IoTiny.
The one complaint about the system is powering it. Off the shelf power supplies don’t seem to do the trick, so I end up using Lipo batteries instead.
To program your robot you have a powerful scripting language, Blockly and RoboScratch (familiar to many classrooms and Pi users).
For example, to move a couple of servos, it would be as simple as:
repeatwhile( 1 )
servo( D0, 0 )
servo( D1, 0 )
sleep(5000)
servo( D0, 50 )
servo( D1, 50 )
sleep(5000)
endrepeatwhile
At only $24.99 USD it is well worth considering for your next robot product so that you can make use of all the easy plug and play scripting the EZ-Robot platform affords you.
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