My daughters are really into robots. They love going to the science camps during school holidays and the highlight is always programming the lego mindstorm robots.

So I got all excited about getting them a robot for xmas, and so I went looking. My friend Roy recently blogged about robots (hacking a Roomba! and Makeblock) and this really wetted my appetite :)

In the end I got them a SparkFun Redbot inventor kit. Its an Arduino with line followers, whiskers, accelerometer for bump detection and magnetic wheel rotation counters.

But its really bugging me how limited the Arduino is!

Here’s the Raspberry Pi Zero that I read about recently:

The Arduino is a very expensive weakling! Raspberry Pis are fast proper computers, roughly equiv to a laptop from just a few years ago.

All Raspberry Pis have good connectivity. Those holes along the edge in that picture above are 27 GPIO! All Raspberry Pis have staggering compute ability. You could easily hook up the camera module, and even do live visual obstacle avoidance etc on the Pi. Or stream the video over wifi to a computer if you want even more ooomph. And the Raspberry Pi is affordable. The Pi Zero is famously £5!

So I went into this with the expectation that I’d get a Raspberry Pi for £5 and then pick up a robot chassis with motors and sensors that just slotted into the GPIO header.

And there simply aren’t any! If you google for it sure there are very few home-build projects, but very little using the Raspberry Pi for any kind of roboting at all. You can find a handful of images, and accounts of people trying it etc, but all the online retailers in my region there simply weren’t any!

I asked friends, some who have several Raspberry Pis… Nobody had seen or heard of any Raspberry Pi robots.



People who use the Raspberry Pi seem to mostly use it as a cheap replacement for Apple TV. Most Pis just languish unused, brought on a whim by a programmer with no real use for them… :(

This makes no sense to me. I thought the Raspberry Pi was all about teaching, and imagined that every classroom would have Pi-based super-cheap robots for teaching programming…?

So I’ve gone spent easily 10x the money on an Arduino bot with 2KB RAM… :(

Now we’re quite excited about the redbot, and will be mastering mazes and things. And hopefully get brave enough to mod it.

But I think that if it were a much more powerful computer, it would open up a whole new level of teaching, particularly using a camera sensor for driving. Right now with the Arduino there are all kinds of platform limitations to work around and keep in mind that are just clutter and disengagement for the kids.

I might help the kids make proper robots etc. Every programming father’s dream, right? That’ll probably never happen, more fool me etc. What I was expecting was that classrooms would be full of little Raspberry Pis being taught how to navigate mazes and stack blocks and things, and this just doesn’t seem to be happening :(

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