Smartibot
A few weeks back the KickStarter for the Smartibot was fulfilled. A colourful flat box arrived with the familiar robot, teabot and unicorn on the front.
The motors and driver board were very similar to those that I’d used for the Stainless Steel Unicorn last year. There have been a few changes to the board and the silk screen looks better. The team have also added
The Kit
The kit comes with three lots of cardboard templates, an instruction book, poster, battery box, motors, control board and even a couple of screwdrivers to help you assemble it.
You’ll need 4 AA batteries and a mobile phone or table that can download apps from Apple or Google.

The instructions have been designed to work without text, so you just follow along with the pictures. We built the
The motors were powerful enough to transport tea and various other items around the house. The wheels did spin on the table so we followed the tip to put rubber bands around the wheels. The motors did sound like they were straining a bit on the carpet with a full load.

The app
The app for the kit is quite intuitive. It’s got a big icon for the remote control option and another for the AI controlled version.
The

What next?
The Smartibot is not quite complete. There’s a block based coding platform to be released so you can programme it yourself. I do hope that this incorporates the AI aspect so you could for example have the bot avoid collisions.
There’s also a lot of hardware on the board that’s not used. There’s a bunch of servo headers, a connector that is marked “audio” and some

Conclusion
It is a well made and designed kit and the AI aspect works well. It’s easy to assemble and the robots work well. We had no issues with the electronics or software part of the kit. We did not try connecting up other things as the body of the robot but the examples I’ve seen mean that it is very flexible.
My main complaint would be that you need to disassemble each kit to move the motors to the next one. And perhaps the instructions could have better separation for the 3 different projects.
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