Many of you probably will have heard of Ryan Walmsley, the guy who created Raspberry Pi tracker Rastrack. Ryan’s been working for several months on a robotics project he’s called Turtlteck. It’s basically a simple wheeled robot with a microcontroller board which he’s programmed to act rather like a classic “turtle”.
You program it with the direction buttons and hit the middle button to make it ‘GO’.
Turtlteck Robot
I backed the project on KickStarter early on because it’s interesting and because, even though it doesn’t directly involve the Raspberry Pi, Ryan’s budding electronics business stems largely from Pi-inspired learning.
Ryan offered to send me one early, I said I’d love to blog about it and maybe make a little video.
With Or Without Chassis
You can either get just the Turtlteck board, or the full robot chassis (with or without Ryan’s motor controller board). You can also use the chassis with a Raspberry Pi.
The chassis took me about half an hour to complete, but if you’re less fussy about where the wires go, you could do it in half that time. There’s no need to solder anything. It’s all nuts and bolts and screw terminals.
Reverse Polarity Didn’t Kill It :)
I made a mistake and got the polarity of the battery cables wrong. Whisps of magic white smoke appeared and I popped a battery out as quickly as I could. The chips both got a bit hotter than they should. Fortunately, once corrected, the board still worked as it should.
Here’s My Turtlteck Video
The video describes it much better than text…
Where Can I Get One?
For the next seven days, you can still back Ryan’s KickStarter campaign. After that they’ll be available from Ryanteck Ltd via Turtlteck.UK