Activities/TurtleBots

TurtleBots is TurtleBlocks with some robot  plugins: Butiá, Lego NxT, Lego WeDo, FollowMe

Download TurtleBots for Sugar

Download TurtleBots for other platforms

Support for this activity is provided by the developer at butia@fing.edu.uy

Butiá
Project Butiá aims to create a simple and inexpensive platform to enable students from public high schools, in coordination with teachers and inspectors of Secondary Education, to learn the programming of robots' behavior.



The Butia team is located in Uruguay, detailed documentation exists in the Spanish language:

Project Butia Homepage (in Spanish)

Project Butia Homepage (in English)

Flickr Photostream

Wiki (in Spanish)

The XO laptop sits on a baseplate which also has 2 motors, sensors and a battery pack. The motors and sensors interface to the XO through a small PCB, either an Arduino Mega and shield or a Usb4butia PCB (which uses a PIC microcontroller). The connection between the XO laptop and the small PCB is by USB cable. The cable must stay connected while the program is running.



Shown L-R, the Arduino Mega, the shield PCB which plugs into the Arduino Mega, the Usb4Butia which replaces both boards in later versions of the Butia

To install the software which runs on Usb4Butia, there is an activity ButiaFirmware Activity which runs on a XO.

The robot's controlling program runs on the XO laptop, typically TurtleBots, the pallette of blocks is shown below. Control by programs in Lua,  ,  or Python is also possible.



Lego NxT
See Activities/Turtle_Art

Lego WeDo
See Activities/Turtle_Art

FollowMe
See Activities/Turtle_Art