A Drone You Can Program – Introducing PlutoX

PlutoX Aerial Robotics Kit

The PlutoX Aerial Robotics Kit is a DIY quadcopter that you can program and add your own hardware to. This unique device is perfect for experimenters, hobbyists and basically anyone who is interested in developing a project that can fly.

In this article I’ll introduce you to the PlutoX and to the Cygnus IDE, the development environment you’ll use to write code for the drone.

DFRobot 5 DOF Robot Arm – Building the Robotic Arm

Robot arm with controller

The DF Robot 5 DOF Robot Arm kit is a high-quality robotic arm that you can assemble yourself. With heavy duty servo motors and sturdy aluminum parts this inexpensive arm is perfect for your robotics experiments

Follow along as I assemble the robot arm. I’ll also build a simple robot arm controller based on the Arduino Nano and the PCA9685 16-channel PWM module.

Getting Moving with XOD – Robot Car Part 1

XOD Robot Part 1

XOD is a method of programming an Arduino using a graphical IDE instead of writing code. In XOD you use a collection of “nodes” connected by “links” to program your Arduino.

In this second installment on our series on XOD I’ll show you some ways of improving your XOD projects by using multiple patches, custom nodes and XOD libraries.

But the real fun is that in this article we’ll also start working on a practical project – a XOD robot! So let’s get started.

Build a Robot Car with Speed Sensors

Robot Car With Speed Sensors

I’m sure you have seen those inexpensive robot car chassis kits, the ones that come with two 6-volt motors. They are great fun and very useful and they even come with a couple of speed encoder disks (those little black circles full of holes). Problem is, no one tells you how to use them!

Let’s resolve that and build a robot car with speed sensors. Along the way we’ll learn how to use Interrupts, a valuable programming technique.