Andy Lindsay in his office at Parallax Inc. headquarters

Hi! I’m Andy Lindsay, Education engineer and author at Parallax Inc. Robotics with the Board of Education Shield for Arduino is one of my latest book projects. It’s also my first time writing about the Arduino.

I’ve had lots of experience writing books about the BASIC Stamp and Propeller microcontrollers, and the original Robotics with the Boe-Bot (for the BASIC Stamp 2) is one of the most popular. I was able to refine it over the years, based on requests and feedback from teachers, students, and hobbyists as I traveled in the U.S. and abroad teaching Educators Courses. Teacher requests for Arduino support led to Parallax Education collaborating with SimplyTronics on the Board of Education Shield design, which gave me the opportunity to write this book.

Exploring the Arduino and updating the book’s experiments for the BOE Shield was a lot of fun. Porting the code over from PBASIC went well, and I used standard Arduino libraries whenever possible. For example, the Servo library worked great for simple navigation, like on this page. I made a few custom sensor functions in later chapters. It turned out that the BOE Shield-Bot’s light sensors responded better to RC decay than A/D conversion—look for that one next week. Navigation using infrared object and distance detection with TV remote parts is coming soon too.

Since this is our first Arduino project, we asked Gordon McComb (author of Microcontroller KickStarts among many, many other things) to help us with the tech review. His insights have been awesomely helpful. We’d like yours, too! If you poke around the tutorial website, email [email protected] and let us know what you think.

-Andy

The Parallax BOEBot Robot for Arduino Kit

Learn more and read lessons at the Parallax BOE Bot site.