Real robots

Does anyone have experience with Realrobots. It's a kit that comes in installments. I just got the first one and it seems good. Only problem is it is a lenghty process and maybe expensive. However it seems to be an excellant way to learn.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Reply to
Quentin Monnin
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Is this the US version? We've had it in the UK for the last two years and have had to endure the development cycle, with bug-fixes, upgraded boards and the like. The US version should be bug-free (ho ho). It is good and it does work, but you might feel the final cost is a bit steep. The chassis makes a good platform for other projects. The magazine (UK version) is aimed at the 13-14 year old age group and is quite educational. At an early stage I bought chassis parts as spares and put my own electronics on board - the description and schematic for Cy-Q are on my web site at:

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Bill Marshall

Reply to
Bill Marshall

Yes I have the US Version. I think I'll go on with it for a few more installments at least. It looks like it takes months and months to complete and ends up costing over $1000.00 (USD). However like you say it iappears to be very informative. Thanks for your input.

Reply to
Quentin Monnin

I got the UK version. Started off fairly slowly. Eventually lsot interest and the subscription service was *extremely* poor (lots of magazines arrived out of order or not at all).

My best advice is to not buuild anything until you have about 4 or 5 magazines as lots of times I would find my self putting it all together, only to find that in a few magazines later it says "undo part X and put in part Y, then replace part X". Might be ok if you have really small hands but I found it VERY irritating.

Eventually I cancelled subscription after I had the handset controller and programmability functionality components (incidentallly someone has created a proper language for "real" programming the robot - otherwise you are stuck with nasty kiddie flow chart type things) and just sat down one night with about 20 magazines and put it all together. They seem to be comming up with a load of random stuff just to keep making money out of you (built in "ball flipper" attatchment, headset with built in torch, voice recognition, the list goes on).

Its fairly expensive and I am not sure it was really worth it considering what I got at the end. Still, it was an experience! Chassis would be useful for hobby projects I guess. I was really only ever interested in getting a platform working that would allow me to programme it easily. Bit disappointed with the programmability really but it is aimed at kids I guess.

Reply to
Matt Dibb

Well its still going in the UK so we don't know what the final cost is going to be.

Dave

Reply to
Dave Stanton

If you want to go further & hack into the guts of these Cybots, have a look at these two sites.

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consists mainly of PDF files of the circuits

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one I think is better written and has the circuits within the HTML pages along with photo's and explanations.

Reply to
Imagineering Unlimited

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