Kylie (8 years old) and Grandpa Bruce (a bit older...) have decided to do a fun, science project together over the summer vacation, and Kylie picked a robot project. Kylie is the Project Manager and Grandpa is the Project Engineer (and the venture capital provider).
We defined the phases of the project: 1) Planning, 2) Buying Parts, 3) Building Subassemblies, 4) Final Assembly, 5) Test, 6) Fix, 7) Demonstrate Final Robot. We have completed the planning phase and have a concept, top level requirements, subassemblies defined, initial parts list defined, and most importantly, the color determined, PINK. This was a project management decision not engineering...
Engineering did some consulting with a great robotics team at work and decided it would be cool to use a Raspberry Pi computer and an Arduino micro-controller for our project. Thus the name: Pinky PiBot!
Kylie set the top level requirements, one of her project manager jobs is to keep the requirements from changing during execution. She wants it to have 4 wheels instead of tracks, have a box body and head, and have real time video streaming to an iPad app for video display and robot control. She did a lot of searching on the web for suitable components, and Grandpa selected the RPi and Arduino. Below is a picture of the current concept and major components.
The real objective is to give Kylie an opportunity to learn a little about projects, how they are planned and managed, tools like Excel, PowerPoint and a little bit about computers and programming. Hopefully Grandpa can keep a step ahead...
Footnote about internet safety: this blog is from Grandpa's account and Kylie will compose and edit offline and when she comments or posts it will be supervised.
