Robomov - Soccer Robots for Teens
High school, middle school, students teachers: Come in and program a robot, watch our robots chase the ball, and dream of participating in RoboCup. YOU CAN DO IT!
No plug-and-play blackbox - Real Robotics for Teens!
Robomov
Founded by parents of a 7th grader as robot kit retailer and developer in 2018 in Princeton, NJ, USA.
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What are some of the challenges you have encountered and how did you address them?
One of the biggest hardware challenges I faced was the robot randomly restarting in the middle of a program. At first I was using the ESP32 so I changed it for a teensy 4.0 but it did not help. The restarting usually happened when motors swapped directions so I tried fixing electromagnetic interference through ground isolation and protection diodes. However, the final fix turned out to be just using a teensy 4.1 instead of 4.0. Aside from the restarting issue, the motor drivers used in the kit became out of stock in 2021 due to the chip shortage, so I had to design another version using a different motor driver chip with different interfacing, while still making the user experience indistinguishable between the two versions.
On the software side, the difficulties revolved around making things beginner friendly. Making a beginner friendly library in C++ and making short bite sized videos instead of long text explanations were some of the fixes I made after initial experimentation.