Robot Description

Description of the Base STEM Robot

The base STEM robot has the following descriptive text. This text is important because it is used as a "seed" to generate lesson plans about the robot.

The STEM Robot is a low-cost but fun robot designed to teach kids
the principles of computational thinking.  It is built around the
Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontrollers and is programed with MicroPython.
It is designed to cost under $19.

The base STEM robot has the following parts:

1. 2x 6-volt DC hobby motors with wires pre-soldered
2. 4x AA batteries in a battery pack with wires
3. A "Smart Car" chassis that parts are mounted to with screws
4. A Cytron Maker Pi RP2040 robotics board that
includes:
    1. 2x DC motor drivers
    2. 13x blue GPI statusLEDs
    3. 2x RGB LED NeoPixels
    4. a Piezo buzzer with mute switch
    5. two customizable momentary push buttons
    6. 7x Grove connectors with four wires
    7. 4x servo drivers
    8. a power on switch with a power indicator LED
    9. 4x red LEDs and buttons to test the motor connections
    10. a port for charging a LiPo battery
5. A VL53L0X time-of-flight distance sensor that
uses the I2C protocol to measure distance
6. A USB cable for programming the robot from a PC or Mac

The robot is programmed with the Thonny Integrated
Development for MicroPython.  Note that the RP2040 is
a dual-core micro-controller with 264K SRAM and 2MB
flash memory.  The RP2040 includes support for both I2C
and SPI bus.

The STEM Robot works with a website that stores lesson plans,
sample programs and assessments that can be integrated into
a school curriculum and the school's learning management system.

In the future, we will refer to this block of text as the ROBOT_DESCRIPTION text. If you are generating other courses, you can call this COURSE_DESCRIPTION.