BrainBot Intro

The BrainBot is equipped with several sensors and LEDs. We’ll be covering everything in later lessons, so this intro lesson is meant to familiarize you with several details about the BrainBot.

Prerequisite

This assumes you’ve already assembled your BrainBot and are ready to set up the programming environment.

Charging your BrainBot

Plug a micro-USB into the BrainBot (you can use the one that came with your BrainPad). Ensure that the battery is fully inserted into the battery holder. The Charge LED will illuminate. The battery will be fully charged when the Charge LED turns off. The battery that is included is a Li-Po battery and requires special care. Please read the Safety Page carefully.

BrainPad Compatibility

All features work perfectly with BrainPad Pulse, which is the recommended option. However, the BrainPad Tick works as well except for the infrared receiver and buzzer. This means the remote control will not work when using BrainPad Tick.

When plugging in the BrainPad Tick, make sure it is plugged in all the way to the side as shown in the image.

BrainBot Pinout

The BrainBot components connect to the BrainPad through the edge connector. The pinout of the BrainPad is shown on its product page. This section shows the BrainPad pin connections on the BrainBot. This is advanced info at this point as we provide a pre-made driver for you to use the BrainBot with ease.

BrainBot Driver

If you’re using Python, the needed drivers are already built into the firmware. If you’re using C#, we’ll need to add the BrainBot NuGet library the same way we added the BrainPad NuGet when we Created our first C# project. The NuGet driver library is called BrainPad.BrainBot. Once the BrainBot NuGet is loaded, we have to add using static BrainPad.BrainBot to the top of our code. Going forward we will not include this in any example codes, assuming instead you have done so already.

using static BrainPad.Controller;
using static BrainPad.BrainBot;

from BrainPad import *
from BrainBot import *

Controlling the robot is now done easily. More on that in the next lesson.

using static BrainPad.Controller;
using static BrainPad.BrainBot;

Move(50, 50);

from BrainPad import *
from BrainBot import *

Move(50,50)

What’s Next?

Now that everything is set up, we can move to the BrainBot API lesson.

BrainStorm

How safe are robots? What if we have made them smarter and they decided they no longer need us? Believe it or not, this is not a joke! We will soon be riding in cars with full self control. How would a car decide to stop in an emergency? Thankfully, Isaac Asimov has already thought of this and came up with the three laws of robotics:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.