Robot kits?

[team2061]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

There are a lot of sites with a very wide variety. I recently searched for a business thought process of my own. The best thing to do with anything like that is to use the website search engine Google. It can be reached at www.google.com

Yea I already have but there's so many busineses that provide kits and I just wanted to now wat other websites people go on

[dtengineering]

Depending on how bare bones you want to get, I'd suggest that rather than getting a cheap robot kit that you look at getting a good processor, learning to use it, then building a robot around that.

My personal choice is a PIC microcontroller (I use the 16F627a with my students) but that makes sense because we have covered the overhead cost of PIC Basic Pro (a great little programming language) and a PIC programmer as school supplies. I can set the students up with a PIC for less than $2.00 so long as they share the compiler and programmer. For home use you can buy or build your own programmer (google PIC Programmer) and use the free C compiler that comes with MPLAB. Note that the free PICC Lite compiler only works with specific chips.

But that is a pretty technical route... it may be simpler just to buy an Arduino processor board. They can be had for well under $50 and have a USB interface for programming and PC communications.

Learn how to program the Arduino to make LEDs flash and to read input, then start adding components as you can afford them, and you will probably end up with a much cooler, much more customized robot... and learning a heck of a lot more... than by just purchasing and assembling a sub $50 kit.

The lowest price commercially available robot kit that I have experience with and would recommend is the VEX system, which is considerably more than $50.

Jason

[ChuckDickerson]

Parallax BOEBots are pretty cool to play with and I have seen them on Ebay for pretty cheap.

[Andrew Schreiber]

I will second the Arduino, Ive heard some really good things. However, depending on your goals it might be a better option to actually buy the chips and parts and build some bare bones Arduino's with your students. The other added benefit would be that the components are a lot cheaper.