Finch Robot... Really?

erco

Just saw this $99 educational robot in a Make email. Interesting organic shape... The video says they designed it from 4 years of user input. Yikes. Three obvious objections:

1) Tether required! USB powered, no battery on board. Someone thinks a battery is more trouble than a tether. Really?

2) They show a smart phone controller. What, now I plug the tether into my smartphone and drain that battery? Or tether to a Powerbank and hope for the best? Or use a laptop plus a smartphone?

3) Pen mount is far behind the wheel axis. No idea how you're supposed to draw with that.

"Birdbrain Robotics" (seriously) claims the robot is engaging and rich in other features, but they lost me with these two. Now I know very little about robotics, but it appears that they combined the worst of several concepts without compromising any of the shortcomings.

Give me an S3 any day. Heck, give me an original blue Scribbler 1 any day!



https://www.makershed.com/products/finch-robot

GordonMcComb

I would agree a tethered design seems rather odd for most of us here. Not sure about their arguments against untethering - a USB cable could be recharging a builtin LiPo, and for remoting the BBC Microbit, as a comparison, has managed a built-in radio with 100 channels. (Actually it's one channel, but messages are prefixed so only the "tuned in" bot will respond to them.)

We'll have to see. Four years of development, and it's from CMU -- a pedigree worth at least considering. Their video needs at least a brief glimpse of the programming interface, though. The physical robot is only half the story.

(I had to chuckle when seeing the wheels. Anyone with a vintage BOE-Bot will recognize the basic look ... a machined white disc with an o-ring around it.)

erco

GordonMcComb wrote: »

(I had to chuckle when seeing the wheels. Anyone with a vintage BOE-Bot will recognize the basic look ... a machined white disc with an o-ring around it.)

Same as my 1998 Growbot:

Microcontrolled

Ha! I've worked with these before, the CS department at my university got a grant and bought a lot of them, and they were recruiting engineering students with "robotics experience" to write some demo code for them. All the issues you brought up are pretty on point, the tether messes with everything. I wrote a demo program for one that would allow you to enter a name in a serial terminal on a connected PC and it would attempt to write it with the pen. The program worked well on it's own, but the problems were:

(1. The pen is mounted to the back of the bot, and would often cause more or less drag, deforming the letters
(2. The tether cable was quite heavy (USB-B) and had to be awkwardly held up to prevent it from exerting any outside force on the bot
(3. The pen holder isn't really a holder at all, but a half circle on the back of the bot. The pen had to basically be taped to the bot, which could come loose, as the tail was too tapered to allow the tape to be properly wrapped.

I'm not sure the program was ever used for demo purposes, but then again, I can't remember the last event these were demoed at.

But hey, you can control them with Java code, which is where the real priorities lie.

Heater.

And Javascript. Don't forget Javascript !

Does not appeal to me. From an engineering perspective or aesthetically.

GordonMcComb

I suppose it looks like a Finch. But it could also be said it looks a little bit like this guy:



Erco, they stole our idea for FlounderBot!

erco

My bots already do flounder a lot. I wonder if there's anything to those migratory eyes. Eye-gretory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder

ajward

erco wrote: »

Just saw this $99 educational robot in a Make email. Interesting organic shape... The video says they designed it from 4 years of user input. Yikes. Three obvious objections:

1) Tether required! USB powered, no battery on board. Someone thinks a battery is more trouble than a tether. Really?

2) They show a smart phone controller. What, now I plug the tether into my smartphone and drain that battery? Or tether to a Powerbank and hope for the best? Or use a laptop plus a smartphone?

3) Pen mount is far behind the wheel axis. No idea how you're supposed to draw with that.

"Birdbrain Robotics" (seriously) claims the robot is engaging and rich in other features, but they lost me with these two. Now I know very little about robotics, but it appears that they combined the worst of several concepts without compromising any of the shortcomings.

Give me an S3 any day. Heck, give me an original blue Scribbler 1 any day!
/quote]

The critter is kinda cute, I guess, but I like the sort of bots you can easily bolt some gadget on to... like a laser or claw!
Trying to figure out how to mount a small paintball gun on one of them! :-)

Amanda

AwesomeCronk

WASTE OF MATERIALS! I'd buy one just for parts! Accelerometer, obstacle avoidance, temperature, light, you can include all these sensors, abut you can't find room for a battery? Come on!

Microcontrolled

It's not so much that there's no room for a battery, but that the code that controls the robot is run on the computer rather than an onboard microprocessor. They should have made is battery powered and wireless, but that would have probably increased the cost. I'm not fond of the design all around.

AwesomeCronk

The're not even coding a robot? The're just coding an app that runs motors and sensors? WHAT ON EARTH?