Activities/TurtleBots

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

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)

Flickr Photostream

Wiki (in Spanish)

The XO laptop sits on a baseplate which also has 2 motors, sensors and battery pack. The motors and sensors interface to the XO through a small PCB, either Arduino Mega and shield or Usb4butia PCB which uses a PIC 18F4550 microprocessor. The connection between the XO and the small PCB is by USB cable. The cable must stay connected while the program is running.

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 are also possible.