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!)