Plobot

We agreed to run a summer camp with Plobot. That means a lot of kids playing with them at the same time. We ended up adding two layers of acrylic below the encoders in order for them to stand still. Things like that and cutting the terminals of the battery to put them in a connector were done as one of many tasks to put them into the camp. Still a lot of work ahead!

As part of our mad scientist experiments, we need a lot of user feedback. Last weekend we were at the mini Maker Faire that was organized by Concordia School at Shanghai.

One of the things that was surprising is that many not so young kids were interested in Plobot. As part of other project we had some kids soldering their own PCBs and create some simpler version of robots. This really caught parents and kids attention. It is definitively something to look into.

Till the moment I have been using 125kHz for the radio frequency reading of the cards. That means normally 35 turns of copper and also a big area around the Plobot that any other Plobot is around it.

Imagine the scenario, two kids happily playing in different corners of the room, each one programming their Plobot independently. But at some moment one is close to the other and without any apparent reason it stops responding.

The solution has not been found yet, but at least the first step was to reduce the size of the antenna, not only from 35 turns to 4 but also in diameter, from 8cm to almost 4cm. It was a proper hack into a standard RC522 module, but it works !