PicoSMARS - a Pico Powered Robot!
I'm a huge fan of the original SMARS robot - the Screw-less, Modular, Assemble-able Robotic System.
An original SMARS robot
In fact I'm that obsessed with them I started a website - www.smarsfan.com, where I've uploaded how-to guides, tutorials, code for beginners and videos on how to build and solder the parts.
Behold the new Raspberry Pi Pico
I was thinking about how best to improve the site so I started a YouTube channel - SMARSFan Live, where each Sunday evening I would broadcast to YouTube and Facebook content all about these tiny robots. Together we've added Bluetooth for remote control, Made a four-legged quad walking robot version, added line following capabilities and more.
Meet the SMARS family - left to right: Red SMARS Mini with scoop, Original SMARS with Scoop module, Original SMARS, (Back row) Quad SMARS powered by Raspberry Pi Zero with Machine Vision and Speech recognition, Fork-lift module SMARS, SMARS with Matrix display face, (front row continued) Pico SMARS, SMARS Mini, microQuad SMARS - a micro:bit powered SMARS.
I've always been a fan of Arduino and C++, but I'd been learning Python and MicroPython (for the ESP and micro:bit chips) for some time.
Then back in January the Raspberry Pi Organisation launched the Pico and it changed everything. Now, we had a very affordable, massively capable microcontroller that runs MicroPython! I couldn't wait to get this into a SMARS robot and moving about via MicroPython code.
I designed a new module board - see https://youtu.be/Gl4o4iHPvDM for a video about this new addon. And I updated the code to make this robot a true PicoSMARS.
I've uploaded the code to my GitHub repository - https://www.github.com/kevinmcaleer/picosmars so you can follow along and build your own PicoSMARS too.
Here is a quick video of what SMARS can do (and yes with the Pico too!)
PicoSMARS - a Pico Powered Robot!
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Engineer Dec 16,2023
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ElectroMaker Jun 27,2021
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KushagraK7 Jun 22,2021
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(DIY) C64iSTANBUL May 23,2021
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