Pinky PiBot! -- a Raspberry Pi Arduino Project Concept

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.

Now we are anxiously waiting for our parts to be delivered so we can get going.  This is our first adventure with both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino so any suggestions as we go are appreciated!

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.