Hi everybody, my name is Massimo Banzi
and I'm one of the co-founders of Arduino.
Welcome to another series of videos about the Arduino robot sponsored by RS Components.
In the next five videos, David Cuartielles, also a co-founder of Arduino
and Xun Yang, from the Arduino team in Sweden,
are going to guide you through all of the steps needed to set up the robot,
program it, and make it do amazing things.
So in the video that's about to begin,
they're going to teach you how to take the robot out of the box,
set it up, configure it, and get it working.
So I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.
Hello, this is David
Hello, this is Xun.
We're here to talk to you today about the Arduino robot.
This robot has been co-designed by Arduino together with Complubot.
Complubot is a robotics association based in Spain made by Nadea, Ivan, and Eduardo,
that are world experts in educational robotics.
They have a long experience competing at the Robocop Junior,
where they have been earning several awards in the last years.
So we spent some time working with them designing and manufacturing the Arduino robot.
So, Xun, would you make the honours of unboxing?
Sure, let's do it.
So the robot comes with a quite sturdy box
to make sure it's in a good condition.
There's a manual
There's an instructions manual that will help you getting started on how to find information about the robot and software.
LCD Screen.
This screen is a standard Arduino screen,
you can use to show different information on the robot.
You can also use it in other projects.
Power.
It's the power supply you can use to recharge the robot's batteries.
And there's the USB Cable.
It's a USB cable, that you use to reprogram the robot in different ways.
SD Card.
It's a micro SD card, that comes with preloaded images and music
that you can play with the robot.
And the robot.
Finally the robot.
So, I'm going to guide you now, on how to make the basic installation
of the different parts on top of the robot.
You need to mount the screen on top of this connector on the robot.
The robot will always be operated without a screen
but the screen will help you get a much better experience.
So, you just need to unbox the screen.
And you need the micro SD card
that stores the necessary files for running some of the examples.
The files come pre-loaded from the factory.
You just need to plug it into the micro SD card reader that comes with the screen.
Just plug it this way.
And then you just need to plug the screen on top of the robot in this way.
You see, the screen comes with a small sticker marking
more or less in which position you should connect the screen on top of the robot
so the sticker comes by the speaker.
You can remove this marker afterwards.
So now your robot is ready to work.
It comes with an example pre-loaded it's called Hello World Example.
I will ask Xun to guide you through this example.
In this example, you basically store your own name on the robot's name of choice.
In the robot's memory.
Xun.
So the robot comes with 4 AA rechargeable batteries,
and make sure to charge them with the power supply before you start running it.
And this unit is already charged.
Let's just turn it on by turning on the power switch.
So first it's going to show the Arduino and Complubot logos.
And now there's some instructions about how to interact with this example.
Basically you just use your keyboard
and you can use the potentiometers to choose letters and use the keyboard to navigate.
So, first I want to input my name for the robot, which is Xun.
Enter.
Now it's the name of the robot.
Let's call it Bot.
Enter.
Okay, so now the robot is giving me a welcome,
and it asks me to plug it into the computer and start programming with it.
Thank you.
So you'll have noticed that it says here, "Hello Xun."
And this is because the robot has stored Xun's name in this EEPROM chip.
You can use this chip to store different variables that you might be interested in
regarding the configuration of the robot.
So you can call them from different programs.
So, we're going to start programming.
And for programming the robot,
the first thing is that you should turn off the power switch as I just did.
And you will see that the robot has two different boards
and one USB connector on each board.
So, the board on the top is called the control board
and it's the one we will be programming on.
The one on the bottom is called the motor board.
It's the one we will just reconfigure
in case we want to create expert software to control the motors.
For most users, you will never program the firmware on the bottom board.
You can write software for the robot directly from Arduino's IDE.
It's very simple, we're going to show you how to do that now.
So, we're going to program the robot.
Remember the robot comes with two different USB ports,
the one on the motor board
is used to change the default firmware on the robot's motor board,
and we will not work with it today, we will work with the control board,
the one that controls the screen,
the compass, or the EEPROM, among other things.
So we're going to start by programming an example
that will just make the robot move back and forth.
When programming the robot, the robot's wheels are blocked.
In this way you will avoid the robot running away
and carrying away your computer with it.
This robot is very strong, it can carry a half a kilo on top of it,
which means it can probably drag much more behind it.
So, plug the robot into the computer exactly like a normal Arduino Uno board.
When you turn the power on,
the robot will just start with the previous program you had running.
Remember we just experimented with the "Hello User" example,
so it's going to boot the "Hello User" example.
There you go.
Here it is.
I will just unplug it, and show you what you need to have in your computer first.
You should go to Arduino's website and download Arduino software.
That's here on the download link.
Click on it, and it offers you downloads
for all three of the main operating systems.
You just choose the right one for your computer and install it.
Remember you might have to as well install some drivers for the robot to run.
Once you have downloaded and installed the software,
you can just open it and start experimenting with the different examples that come with it.
For the Arduino robot we have created two different sets of examples.
There are some examples for the motor board,
as you see here, and some examples for the control board.
On the control board we have to different sets of examples again.
One are called explore, and are the 11 basic examples
that will let you do almost anything that you can do in the world of robotics.
On the other hand, you have the learn set of examples.
That includes all sorts of more low-level examples
for you to experiment with the robot.
So, let's start by making a very simple motor test on our robot.
As you see here, every example for the robot
needs to include the Arduino robot library.
This will allow you to program the robot as if it was a single object.
You can address any pin on the bottom board or the top board in the same way,
there will be no problem.
In this example, as you see,
you're telling the robot to move forward for a couple of seconds,
stop the motors, wait for a second, move backwards, and so back and forth.
It's kind of like the LED blink for the Arduino robot.
It's a very simple example that will let you understand how everything works.
You plug this to the robot.
Make sure we have the right board selected,
which in this case is the Arduino robot control, the right serial port selected, and upload.
Now the software is in the robot.
But, in this case, we're just basically telling the robot to move forward, backwards, and so on.
As I explained to you, when you plug in the USB power to the robot,
the motors are blocked, and it will not move.
So, right now we will see no behaviour.
If we just unplug this and turn the robot on, see, it's moving forward,
stopping, moving backward, stopping, turning, stopping.
You see?
Let's just put in on the table and Xun will help me stop it from running away.
Turning.
Turning again.
Forward.
Ok, thank you.
So, for this reason we need to block the wheels so the robot doesn't run away.
It's very simple to change the software.
If we just wanted the robot to turn, I can just comment away all of these different lines,
like this one, and just make the robot turn and wait a little bit.
It's very very simple, as you can see, the final program is very short.
We just start the Arduino robot library, start the robot, and tell the robot's wheels to move,
one in one direction and the other one in the other direction,
and that will provoke a spinning movement of the platform in this way.
Okay? So let's plug this in and upload.
Once it's uploaded, I can just turn it on.
And now the robot will just spin in circles.
Let's stop it.
In this episode, we had a brief introduction of the robot's history,
we saw what comes in the package with the robot,
and we saw how to plug the screen to the robot with it's SD card,
as well as how to make a small program that will make the robot move forward,
backwards, and turn in both directions.
Stay tuned, because in the next episode you're going to see how to program a small logo example
where it will be possible to program movements for the robot straight from it's keyboard.
And as we say in Chinese Zai Jian!!
Well, that was fun.
So I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you in the next video
when David and Xun are going to explain to you how to run
the logo example on the robot and how to use the remote control to control the robot.
So, see you next time!