We’ve realized that, even though rover’s not that expensive for a robotic platform, it’s still not quite widely affordable for $1049 for a maker set and $2199 for an assembled one. And as an open source project, we’d like to share the most basic version of our platform.

It will consist of an attachment platform, electronics (our board and Raspberry Pi), compartment for said electronics, plugs and cables. All the specs and neccessary files will be published for free, so most of the parts could be made on your own, but if you don’t want to do everything by yourself, we will be selling all the parts for probably about $100 or less.

Here’s a photo of the prototype, made of actual Turtle Rover’s parts.

Why’d you be interested in one?

It has almost the same amount of capabilities as Turtle Rover — it simply can’t move. But you can attach wheels and suspension and drive it. It’s super customizable and versatile — one can make pretty much any attachment for it. Want it bigger? Simply print yourself a bigger one! Here’s a list of already existing attachments — https://www.thingiverse.com/TurtleRover/designs You could share your creations with other people on a marketplace (soon to come) and earn some buck of it. Project is based on Raspberry Pi, which means that the platform is well known and easy to begin with. It runs on TurtleOS, a slightly edited Raspbian. You won’t have to make your robots from the scratch, so you could focus on their features. We hope people sharing their works, both hardware and software, will make Turtle Rover a staple in consumables electronics, an Android of household and professional robotics. By that we mean that we’d love to make people think of Turtle as a platform, which could be customized as they wish. It’s extremely compact and lightweight in it’s vanilla version

We’re also wondering how should we call it:

- Turtle Rover Dev Kit,

- Turtle Hatchling,

- Turtlet by Turtle.

Which one of those sounds the best? Thanks for sharing your opinions and feedback. We are most likely going to release the project later this week, feel free to follow @TurtleRover on Twitter and r/TurtleRover for updates. Thanks for reading the post!