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)
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 microprocessor). 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
The robot's controlling program runs on the XO laptop, typically TurtleBots, the pallette of blocks is shown below. Control by programs in [| Lua] , [1] , [2] or Python is also possible.
