I’m thrilled to share a new opportunity for FIRST ® teams to enhance their skills and engage with their peers and the wider community. The XRP (eXperiential Robotics Platform), announced at the beginning of July by Sparkfun and DigiKey, is a cost-effective robot designed to bolster software skills among team members. It’s ideal for recruiting new teams and members, conducting workshops, running summer camps, and more.
Additionally, the XRP supports WPILib, offering teams a chance to build confidence in the programming environment used in FIRST ® Robotics Competition. The XRP is currently available as a beta hardware kit from both SparkFun and DigiKey, with a substantial discount for FIRST teams who request the educational or “FIRST Team” discount. Teams who have secured can also use their DigiKey Voucher from the virtual Kit of Parts for the XRP. Due to its popularity, the XRP might sometimes be backordered for brief periods of time, but new units are continuously being made available.
WPILib provides resources to get started with XRP, and there is a discussion forum for XRP users to connect, share ideas, and discuss ways to leverage the XRP to help grow FIRST! In addition, the XRP is now compatible with the Intro to Programming modules in Thinkscape. These modules enable students to learn Java programming basics, including command-based programming using XRP. Here are instructions to access the module.
I amAndyMark excited about the potential this robot and collaboration hold, and I eagerly anticipate seeing the innovative uses our teams and partners find for it. This development is another step towards making FIRST programs more scalable, sustainable, and accessible.
Not gonna lie…I thought this would have been at a much more competitive price, even without the educational discount. Am I wrong here? @marshall I feel like you’d know if I’m being unreasonable.
Educational Discount is quite a bit (almost half), just email spankfun and tell them that you are either a teacher (.edu email will probably help) or you are a mentor with First.
This is a separated but based on ROMI project. It’s just using a RP2040 in place of the PI + Arduino in the ROMI. You do get the added benefit that it can also run CircuitPy/“Blocky” (can’t remember what the block GUI is called off the top of my head) if you dont want to run it in full WPILIB control.
It’s worth noting that in addition to Romi-like use with WPILib, there’s a full online curriculum with Blockly and MicroPython programming, so it can serve dual-purpose as a robot for younger students (e.g. summer outreach programs) as well as a test platform for FRCFIRST Robotics Competition students to learn WPILib.
I’ll keep this short and sweet.
The XRP, at the discount price, is in my opinion the absolute best bang for the buck when it comes to introducing new students to robotics programming.
As the WPILib integration gets refined, it will be a fantastic platform for learning FIRST programming environments and prototyping.
I emailed Sparkfun mid afternoon today at the email provided on the product page asking for details. Hopefully I hear back soon and can report back here…
Is anyone seeing the digikey voucher in their virtual kit of parts? The list of vouchers looks rather short, I’m wondering if they haven’t added them all yet.
I noticed DigiKey missing too. Wasn’t sure if that was an issue with our teams list specifically (the registration billing with Ontario teams is weird/different than US teams, so we didnt see any voucher codes for several days).
