Build Your Own Bot

Everyone has a chore that they absolutely do not want to do, like washing dishes, folding laundry, or taking out the trash. Think for about a minute about how you can engineer a robot that could either do this job for you, or at least make it a little easier.

Next, draw a blueprint of what you want your robot to look like. Keep in mind that you can probably only use the parts in your Rokit Smart kit.

Draw a flowchart of how you will program your robot to work. We’re including an example of a programming flowchart so you get a better idea of how to make your own! After you figure out exactly how everything is going to work, write pseudocode so you can translate everything into Arduino.

This is our example for washing dishes (and we’re going to pretend that this is a waterproof robot, which yours definitely is not):

• Turn on
• Set scrub variable to 20.
• Check sink for dishes with food.
• If dishes have food on them, load brushes with dish detergent and scrub 20 times.
• Else, if dish is clean, check for dirty dishes.
• Else, clean 20 more times.

Once you have a blueprint and your pseudocode, you can start building! You don’t need to stick to your blueprint if you feel like you can change something for the better. Just try to keep the original purpose of your robot in mind.

Once you have your robot built with the Smart Inventor Board attached, you can write your program! Use your pseudocode to help you out, and if you need any review, go back to previous programming lessons. Here’s a couple of things for you to remember:

• Include the Smart Inventor library at the beginning of your code.
• Void setup() is for things you only need to happen once and void loop() is for anything running continuously.
• After using one if statement, use else if statements. The last statement should be an else statement.

Check the next lessons for more things that can help you out with your program!

Once you have everything built and programmed, test your robot out to see if it can help you out with your chores! If something isn’t working the way you want it to, figure out if it’s an issue with your building or coding, and then problem solve from there. Don’t worry — this is a completely normal part of engineering!