New Product Post
After last week’s exciting introduction of Makeblock, the make-your-own robot project, we’re continuing the robot theme this week with some fabulous products from Vstone, an innovative company that develops and manufactures robots and related products for research and produces smaller form factor robots for the average consumer. Vstone is well known for its humanoid type designs and has won Robo Cup, the soccer tournament of robots, for five years straight from 2004 – 2008.
We currently offer two products from Vstone. The first, Robovie – X, is a humanoid robot for beginners. With it’s easy to assemble design and the “Robovie Maker” software, set up and programming is a breeze. You will be amazed at how something so simple to build and program can do so many things, like run, dance, flip, and play soccer. If you want to add to your robots complexity, sensor expansion is available.
We also offer Beauto Racer from Vstone. This is a very cool car that uses infrared sensors to detect between white and black, so you can program it to follow black lines on a white surface. This kit only has ten parts, is easy to put together, requires no tools for assembly, and runs on a single AA battery. It comes with its own software for programming, Beauto Builder R. Simply load the software on the PC, plug your robot into the USB slot, and start programming by dragging the mouse to arrange and connect the boxes in a flowchart format.
On a different note, we have Little Wire, a mini microcontroller board for projects where you just need a few pins and not a full-fledged board like an Arduino. Little Wire has 4 Digital I/O pins. Four of the pins can be used as strictly digital. Of the four, 2 are capable of PWM output. In addition, 2 of these pins can also be used as analog input pins. Little Wire also handles SPI and I2C for serial communication. For projects that include control from a computer over USB, Little Wire includes libraries for Processing (currently Windows only), C# (currently Windows only), C, and C++. Lastly, Little Wire can be used to program other AVR chips as it doubles as a USBtiny compatible AVR programmer.
Remember how we mentioned last week that the Makeblock team of Jasen and Alex were busy working on expanding the line with different colors? Look no further than the Ultimate Makeblock Starter Kit – Blue. As you can tell from the title, this make-your-own robot kit now comes in blue which is in addition to the original gold Ultimate Makeblock Starter Kit. These kits are a great value because they contain all of the parts for the 2WD Crane Robot Kit, the 4WD/2WD Robot Kit, and the 4-Leg Crawler Robot; furthermore, they have additional components for constructing add-ons. They are all still listed at the special discounted price. So take advantage now because this sale is offered for a limited time.
That’s all for now. Until next time, keep on making.
(written by Erin Linke)
About Author
