Introduction to STEM Robot Kits
Base STEM Robot Bot
This is our low-cost entry-level robot. It is an open architecture robot with many ways to enhance it using additional sensors, displays and controls.
- Total cost: $18
- Cytron board: $11
- Chassis Kit: $4
- Time of Flight Distance Sensor: $3
Base Bot with 8-Element NeoPixel
- Total cost: $19
- Cytron board: $11
- Time of Flight Distance Sensor: $3
- 8 Element NeoPixel Strip
Display Bot
The display bot is our most popular robot. It adds a bright $13 OLED display to the front of the robot so you can see the internal state of the robot and display faces on the robot. This does increase the price of the base robot to around $32 per robot, which is still about 1/10th the price of many other STEM robot kits such as the Lego Mindstorms robot kit.
Adjusta Bot
This robot starts with the Display robot and adds three potentiometers so the parameters of collision avoidance — motor power, distance threshold, and turn time — can be tuned by turning a knob instead of editing code. It's ideal for classrooms without a PC available for every robot.
Bump Switch Bot
Although we love our low-cost $3 time-of-flight distance sensor, this retro robot shows that sometimes a simple switch can be an effective signal to the robot that it is time to turn.
Line Follower Bot
This robot uses two low-cost IR sensors to follow a line on the floor, teaching the concept of feedback control. It requires careful calibration of sensor sensitivity and motor power balance, and it's a favorite "aha" moment once students get it working.
Ultrasonic Bot
This robot swaps the time-of-flight sensor for a low-cost HC-SR04P ultrasonic distance sensor, giving students a second way to measure distance for collision avoidance.
WiFi Robot
Our low-cost Cytron Maker Pi RP2030 board does not have support for WiFi. Now worries! Cytron has another version called the PICO ROBOT that allows you to plug in ANY board from the Raspberry Pi Pico family including the powerful Raspberry Pi Pico W that supports BOTH WiFi and bluetooth wireless communication. There are two variations, one with a display and one without a display. My advise? Go with the display!
Digital Compass Kit
This kit includes a low-cost digital compass to show how these fun direction sensor work to help robots navigate the world. Note that this kit is not a complete robot. This $20 kit only needs a Pico, a sensor and a display mounted on a breadboard.
Motion Sensor Kit
This kit demonstrates how sensitive accelerometers and gyroscopes work together to detect motion in our robots. The kit is now a complete robot, it is just a simple pico, display and a MPU6050 sensor. But our students love this little but mighty kit!
9-DOF IMU Kit
This kit wires up a full 9-axis motion sensor — a gyroscope plus a combined accelerometer/magnetometer, on two separate chips sharing one I2C bus — to a bare Pico on a breadboard. It's not a complete robot either; it's the bench test that proves the sensor works before it becomes the compass for a future swarm of robots.
Rainbow Bot
We add a colorful 8x8 NeoPixel matrix to the base robot for one of our most colorful robots. Kids love to change the color and patterns created as the robot move and change direction.
Rainbow Bot 8x8 NeoPixel Matrix
Swarm Robot
This robot really rocks when you have two or more robots working together. One is a "master" that tells the other "slave" robots what direction it is going and how fast it is going there. Although you will need several WiFi Display robots retrofitted with sensors to demonstrate this capability, it shows how both sensors and wireless communication can be added to our robots to show new capabilities.
Note - if you are not familiar with integrated motion units (IMUs) we suggest you try the Compass and IMU kits first.