March 20, 2015Tiny Ringo teaches kids about robotics

The teeny Ringo robot from Portland's Plum Geek

Image Gallery (5 images)

Though you can work with your kids on all sorts of crazy electronics projects by adding numerous shields, break-out boards and attachments to existing development platforms or going wild with Lego Technic building blocks, such solutions just weren't cute enough for Kevin King and his kids Halley and Parker. Their digital pet is called Ringo and thanks to a successful crowdfunding effort, the teeny Arduino-based robotics and programming learning tool could be swarming toward backers in the coming months.

King and company have crammed an awful lot of goodness into a palm-sized package. The Ringo bot has a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope built in, six RGB LED lights, an integrated piezo sound element and bot-to-bot wireless comms for creating swarms. It sports three sensors for detecting ambient light for 360 degrees around itself, IR LED transmitters, a 38 kHz TV remote receiver, and variable speed pager motors that contact the surface so that the robot can move around a flat surface like a table top.

A light sensor and an IR light source are hidden away under both of the Ringo bug's feeler antennas and there's another sensor at the back end, allowing it to sense edges or follow lines so that crazy scientists can send the robot down complicated mazes or around a never-ending lined track. It gets its power from a single-cell Lithium battery and at its heart is the same microprocessor as the Arduino UNO, which runs at 8 MHz.

The Ringo platform comes pre-loaded with 10 different behaviors to get little tinkerers started. The system makes use of Arduino IDE for robotics programming adventures, and the developers have already created some custom libraries and functions so that youngsters don't have to worry about climbing over hurdles like coding the accelerometer and gyro or working through some heavy math to calculate movements. Videos and tutorials on how to write code for the Ringo bot are also in the pipe.

As all Ringo programmers will be using the same hardware, any clever, creative and fun behaviors coded by young roboticists can be shared with others, and user creations will be featured online for easy download or for some pre-install custom tweaking.

As the first Ringos roll out to backers of the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign being used to jumpstart production, all files, schematics and source materials relating to the project will be released to the open source community.

As of writing, the campaign only has a few short hours to run, but funding has already been secured. If you're quick, you can still pledge US$89 for a single fully assembled robot and, should all go to plan, the first Ringos will start shipping this coming May.

小小Ringo机器人教孩子们自主开发机器人

Tiny林戈教孩子们关于robotics

波特兰的梅野人

图片廊（5图像）的蝇头林檎机器人

虽然你可以与您的孩子在各种疯狂的电子项目，加入大量的工作盾牌，分线板和附件，以现有的开发平台或将狂野与乐高工艺积木，这些解决方案只是没有凯文国王和他的孩子们哈雷和帕克足够可爱。他们的电子宠物被称为林戈和感谢一个成功的集资努力，蝇头基于Arduino机器人技术和编程的学习工具，可以蜂拥朝着未来数月的支持者。

国王和公司都挤满了非常多的善良成手掌大小的包。该林戈机器人有一个3轴加速度传感器和内置的3轴陀螺仪，六RGB LED灯，集成压电声音元素和漫游到机器人的无线通讯科创建群。它拥有三个传感器用于本身周围360度的检测环境光，红外LED发射器，一个38千赫电视远程接收器，和可变速度寻呼机电机接触所述表面，使得所述机器人能够围绕一个平坦的表面像桌子顶部移动。

光传感器和红外光源下都林戈错误的触角天线隐藏起来，并有另一个传感器在后端，使其能够感知边缘或遵循行，这样疯狂的科学家可以派机器人下来复杂的迷宫或周围一个永无止境的内衬轨道。它得到它的力量从单节锂离子电池，并在它的心脏是相同的微处理器为的Arduino UNO，运行频率为8 MHz。

的林戈平台预装有10个不同的行为来获得一点能工巧匠启动。该系统使得机器人编程冒险使用Arduino的IDE，而开发人员已经创建了一些自定义的库和功能，使青少年不必担心攀越障碍像编码加速计和陀螺仪或工作通过一些沉重的数学计算动作。视频和教程如何编写代码的林戈机器人也都在管

由于所有林戈程序员将使用相同??的硬件，年轻的机器人专家编码的任何巧妙，创意和乐趣的行为，可以与他人分享，而用户作品将在网上方便地下载或某些预安装自定义调整展出。

作为第一Ringos铺开到Kickstarter的集资活动的支持者被用来快速启动生产，所有的文件，图表和与项目有关的原始资料会发布到开源社区。

截至发稿时，该活动只有短短几个小时来运行，但资金已经有了保证。如果你快，你仍可以保证US $ 89单完全组装机器人，都应该去计划，第一Ringos将开始出货这个今年5月