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mBot and Me ( or to be more accurate, mBot and us ) by Lindsay Rooms MBE An informative guide for both the young and the not so young ! An explanation of everything mBot; including how to use the mBlock 5 programming interface, full details of useful add-on components and the best ways to modify your new robot.

Contains a comprehensive and in-depth guide to

designing and scripting programmes using mBlock 5.

Windows 10 / mBlock v. 5.1.0 - 2020 Edition

mBot and Me ( or to be more accurate, mBot and us ) by Lindsay Rooms MBE

An in-depth guide

for both the young and the not so young ! A comprehensive and sequential explanation of everything mBot; including how to use the mBlock 5 programming interface, full details of useful add-on components and the best ways to modify and programme your new robot.

Windows 10 / mBlock 5

2020 Edition

For Emma

a Scientist ? an Engineer ? a Dancer ?

Que Sera, Sera - Whatever Will Be, Will Be

Whatever she does, I will be a proud Grandad .

"Don't let your past dictate who you are; but let it be part of who you will become". also dedicated to

John Coll

Pioneer P.C. Specialist

& I.T. Philanthropist John Coll was asked by the BBC to help draw up the functional description for a computer which could be used as part of a television series to teach computer literacy. - Quote: determination and sheer brilliance that really pulled the whole thing off".

Contents

Chapter 1 An " or how it all began " ......................................... 1 Chapter 2 About ............................................. 4 Chapter 3 Aboutthe Robotics Device ........................................................... 8

Chapter 4 About ................................................................................... 11

Chapter 5 About the ..................................................... 15 Chapter 6 Setting up and ......................................................... 22

Chapter 8 All About ............................................................................... 33

Chapter 9 - the Basics .......................................................... 35 Chapter 10 About ......................................................... 44 Chapter 11 with mBlock 5 .............................................................. 52 Chapter 12 mBlock 5 - ................................................... 70 Chapter 13 Discovering ........................................................ 76 Chapter 14 Creating for mBlock 5 ........................................ 80 Chapter 15 Building a for mBot ............................................... 98 Chapter 16 Creating in mBlock 5 ............................................. 137 Chapter 17 About ............................................. 151

Chapter 18 .......................................................................................... 157

Chapter 19 An mBot Project ................................................ 160 Chapter 20 An mBot Project................................................... 171

Appendices

Appendix 3 mBot Servo Project - Robot - ................................ 199 Appendix 4 mBot Servo Project - Robot - ....................... 205 Appendix 5 mBot Servo Project - Robot - ...................... 215 Appendix 11 mBot & Mblock 5 - All you need to know about ................ 233 Appendix 12 mBot Light & Sound Project - Robot ................. 239 Appendix 13 mBot Light & Sound Project - ................. 243 Appendix 14 mBot Light & Sound Project - Robot .......................... 253

Appendix 15 mBot components - the latest bits .................................................. 256

mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide mBot and Me - a Beginner·s Guide - Page 1

Chapter 1 - An Introduction "RUKRZLWDOOEHJDQ"

Well it all began on Christmas morning,

December 2017

Emma (aged 7 1/4) began to demolish the huge

Christmas Tree - eventually we could see the

floor and one neat & medium-sized (almost

200mm square & 100mm deep) box-like

present remained. It was for me! It felt fairly solid and fairly heavy and when I unwrapped it, the box said - construct your and . It also said that was an

It also said on the front of the little booklet inside the top of the box that it was - One Robot per

ChildSTEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) - so was this really a present for me explained quickly that this was for me to show Arduino - is that a fundamental particle of nuclear physics?- I was now

Had she thought to herself - mum, that is -

Keeping the old-boy's brain overloaded more like! Well, it is my seventieth birthday this year.

I had heard of Scratch and knew that it was a graphical programming interface for kids using coloured

blocks that fit together like a sequential jigsaw, but I had never used it and had considered it to be a bit

too simple. I wondered how much mBot had cost them? Ball-park figure in the UK about £85 I guess.

So, with the festivities in full swing & lunch imminent, I had to put the box to one side. Eventually, in a

processor board and the chassis were in full view at the top of the box in a very neat cardboard tray. We

lifted it out and examined the contents - it was all beautifully made. In the bottom of the box was another cardboard divided tray with all the other bits. Little brown plastic bags that contained mysterious circuit boards which we left untouched, bags of screws & nuts, cables & the wheels. Emma -off the wrapping before I could blink and hexagonal cross-section. She studied all the bits that were unpacked and tea-time approaching, I promised her that we (she, I mean) would build it soon - but not today. Well, the next time we would meet to do that would be just over a week later - her first day back at school after the Christmas holiday which coincided with the day of the week we normally go to visit. That gave me time to study all about it - I thought! mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide

Page 2 - mBot and Me -

a Beginner·s Guide

On the day after Boxing Day I started my researches on the great world-wide inter-web and immediately

saw that there was a lot more to this mBot and Scratch programming than I thought. I found several rather informative videos on YouTube and marked one of them showing the build-sequence with a bookmark to show Emma before we (she) started our own construction. I found out a lot about Makeblock who manufacture & market mBot too and I had a go at tentatively trying to slot some programming blocks together on the mBlock programming interface which I had to download from Makeblock. I also downloaded it to my Surface tablet PC so that I could communicate with mBot via

Bluetooth.

Why a book?

-line everything I could about MakeBlock, Scratch and mBot - there was so much out there - too much to comprehend and in drips and drabs in many diverse places

with nothing explained in complete and understandable sequences of what to do first, second etc. - so I

started making comprehensive notes to get my head around it all. A book on mBlock was what was I needed - so I looked; and there was plenty to be found on Scratch but almost nothing specific to mBlock or mBot written in English. There seemed to be paperbacks in German and Dutch and several non-English hardback versions together

But nothing that seemed to

explain Makeblock What I wanted (and seemed to be writing) was a fully-explained, complete and sequential understanding of everything about mBot (and how programming in mBlock works). The title probably should have been but since I seemed to be doing all the work and is the prefix for Makeblock Me series modules

Makeblock e seemed to fit the bill.

A busy week passed in which I decided to visit PC world and buy one of those little dongle gizmos that

you plug in to a USB port to communicate by Bluetooth - this was for my desktop PC which had(as an integral Bluetooth connection as standard. A little poorer by

£13, I got home to test it by linking my

mobile phone to the desktop via Bluetooth.

A week later we collected Emma from

school, and I showed her the little video on my Surface tablet. She seemed very enthusiastic, so we set about undoing all the bags from the box and laying out all the bits on her dining table. Between us, we followed the instruction diagrams in the little book and Emma inserted screws in to all the right places. mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide mBot and Me - a Beginner·s Guide - Page 3 She had already built Lego models on her own (by following pictorial guides) and setting to work on -of-the-box construction, she used her lovely new screw-driver very competently.

I tried to get her to understand

about only holding the edges of the circuit boards, but I totally failed in that respect - and in truth, her little fingers were much nimbler when holding bits and putting nuts on to screws in tight places than my big hands.

It took about half-an-hour to

complete the construction, but by this time (after a long first- day back at school) she was flagging; but perked -up when she flicked the power-switch and mBot burbled for the first- time and came to life. I was relieved that static build-up had not done any damage to its circuits. We connected it with the serial cable to my Surface tablet and I showed her what I had learned about

putting robotics blocks together to make a little programme that did indeed communicate with the robot.

-time she had had enough.

The following week, we had another go. She was lively to start with but was tiring quickly after another

long day. The highlight was the IR remote and the three default modes of mBot operation. She loved

steering it around the house and making mBot chase the cat. She thought that line-following on the little

figure-of-eight track was brilliant too. I thought to myself however that the task I had been set by my

a few technical hitches so far, but nothing that someone reasonably work around. These are often genuine

robotics issues that robot builders will always encounter at some point. All the problems we have had

have been a learning experience (for me) rather than a distraction. As is often the case with computing,

you learn more when stuff goes wrong, and you must fix it or find another way around it.

There are lots of robot toys out there that claim to be truly programmable when they really mean they

can be controlled from a remote or an app. and mBot is indeed programmable. Many educational (supposedly programmable) robots are quite restricted in what they can do. Whereas mBot is

fantastically capable by comparison - and cheaper. With mBot you can design custom robot models that

react to sensors, move, play sounds and update lights; and especially if you add the easily available and

not too expensive add-on packs like the LED Matrix Display Plate (see Appendix 1, page 184) you can develop useful feedback systems. mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide

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a Beginner·s Guide

Chapter 2 - About Makeblock, Scratch and Arduino

About Makeblock

mBot is essentially a children's robot, but it's part of the Makeblock family of beautifully made robotics

kits and components for hobbyists (see the image below). You can progress on to Arduino programming with mBot. Teenagers (and Granddads, one hopes!) will be able to move onto other

robotics products in the Makeblock range and build projects such as a 3D printer, a robot arm, a drawing

machine or a robot of their own design, although much of this stuff is expensive. Makeblock is described as a leading Chinese technology and robotics construction company providing a platform for makers, DIY hobbyists and educators. They raised funds in a crowd-funding oducts - the mBot kit. They have developed Arduino based hardware, robotics hardware, and Scratch based software, providing educational tools (using robotics) for learning programming, engineering, and mathematics. Their robotic kits work with mBlock (a variant of Scratch), a programming language that lets users using programming software which is made up of pre-loaded

colourful and modularized drag-and-drop graphical blocks. Using it, children feel that they can easily

programme mBot without writing difficult code or using textual programming language. Although the company first started out creating robot parts for the do-it-yourself community Makeblock has since shifted its focus to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

educational robots with the belief that it is essential to encourage creativity and innovation in the

younger generations. mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide mBot and Me - a Beginner·s Guide - Page 5 There are two versions of the mBot, a Bluetooth version for home use and a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi version designed for classroom use.

Everything that you need to build it is in the neatly packaged box and you need to assemble it using the

precise instructions provided and then add your own batteries. There are 45 pieces and it's easy to put

them together in about 15 minutes. Once you put everything together, mBot can move around and avoid obstacles on its own, follow a line or just accept commands from the supplied IR remote control. With the Makeblock app for phones and tablets you can control mBot via Bluetooth. For children

especially, it can be a surreal experience to actually build something out of tiny parts and see it come to

'life'. mBot is designed to be tinkered with, and the idea behind mBlock programming interface is that younger children can start out with graphical programming and move on to text-based

programming as they become more advanced. This is what they hope will inspire the next generation of

engineers. Makeblock Me Series Modules (their plug-and-play electronics circuit board components) are designed to be simple to connect and easy to programme and each Me module comes with its own

Arduino library for easy programming.

Makeblock aims to help children build robots and learn to write computer programmes in a fun and

educational way as the trend for incorporating coding (the latest educational buzz-word) and robotics

into education becomes desirable. The company believes that their kits will help users develop logical

thinking and gain the mindset and thought-processes of a programmer - although their systems are not just for aspiring programmers.

About Scratch

Kids from 7 or 8 years old and upwards (inc. their grandparents!) can learn to write simple programmes

for mBot using Makeblock's very intuitively simple to use software mBlock 5 (a variant of Scratch 3) and using this free mBlock software is simplicity itself and causes no problems with the majority of computer operating systems. mBot and Me a Beginner·s Guide

Page 6 - mBot and Me -

a Beginner·s Guide Scratch is both a programming language and an online community where people can programme and share interactive media such as stories, games, and animation with others from all over the world.quotesdbs_dbs47.pdfusesText_47

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