MouseBot

Eddie's been asking for probably a year now for me to take him to the hardware store to "get the parts to make a robot," which I've never wanted to do, since making a robot is much more complicated than he seems to think it is and I didn't want to deal with the inevitable disappointment.

Well, Anne somehow found the perfect book on the subject: Building Your Own Robots. The first project Eddie chose out of the book is MouseBot, a couple of motors wired to batteries and directly attached to rubber-tube "wheels", mounted on a vaguely mouse-shaped foamboard frame. When the batteries are inserted, it zooms around like crazy, bouncing off of things and changing direction. This is pretty much what he was imagining: we got a few cheap parts at the hardware store and assembled them into a robot.

Of course, he's noticed that you can't actually control or program this robot, and he'd like to be able to do that. I don't know if any of the projects in this book go that far—it would be easy to wire a switch in, I guess. If he continues to be interested, it probably wouldn't be hard to talk me into getting an Arduino to programmably control the motors.

Vinci likes it too: