Parallax BOE Shield-Bot book – meet author Andy Lindsay

Andy Lindsay in his office at work
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

Robotics with the BOE Shield link on the learn.parallax.com home page
Learn more and read lessons at the Parallax BOE Bot site.


Halloween season is here!
Halloween season is here! Check out all the posts, gift guides, and more!

Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 38,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — New Products 10/11/2024 Featuring Snap-on Enclosure for Adafruit Feather RP2040 USB Host! (Video)

Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Python Releases, an ESP32+MicroPython IDE and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Garden Lights, Bluetooth 6.0, and more!

Maker Business – Adafruit Daily — First Solar’s $1.1 billion development of vertically integrated factory in the U.S.

Electronics – Adafruit Daily — My signal isn’t THAT noisy, is it?

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.