- What is a robot, really?Sense, decide, act: the loop inside every robot from a vacuum cleaner to a Mars rover, and the parts you will use to build your own.
- Your first circuit: an LED you calculate before you buildVoltage, current and resistance with a water hose, Ohm's law in one line, the breadboard, and an LED that lights the first time.
- Tools and a safe workbench: multimeter, pinout and solderingMeasure voltage, current and resistance with a multimeter, find broken wires with the beep, read resistor colours and a board's pinout, and learn safe soldering basics.
- Your first program: blink, and a button that does somethingPut MicroPython on the ESP32, make an LED blink from code, then let a button change what the program does: sense, decide, act in ten lines.
- Buttons and inputs: pull-ups, bouncing and a start buttonWhat a pin really reads, why a loose pin goes crazy, pull-up and pull-down resistors, why one press counts as five, and a button that works while the program keeps running.
- Light, sound and status: LED brightness, a buzzer and blink codesDim an LED with PWM, make tones with a piezo buzzer, and give your robot blink and beep codes so it can tell you what it is doing without a screen.
- Analogue sensors: reading a knob and a light sensorMeasure a voltage with the ADC, turn a knob into LED brightness, build a light sensor from a voltage divider, calm noisy readings by averaging, and switch cleanly with two thresholds.
- Making things move: servosHow a servo knows its angle, the pulse that sets it, PWM in one picture, and the continuous servos that will become your robot's wheels.
- Motors and motor drivers: why a pin cannot drive a wheelHow a DC motor works, why it needs far more current than a GPIO pin can give, the H-bridge that makes it turn both ways, and what is hidden inside your continuous servo.
- Power for robots: batteries, regulators and a common groundWhere your robot's power comes from and where it goes, how long a power bank lasts, why boards reset when motors start, why every GND must be connected, and how to treat lithium batteries safely.
- Seeing the world: measuring distance with soundHow an ultrasonic sensor measures distance like a bat, the three resistors that protect your board, and code that prints how far the wall is.
- Your robot drives itselfPut the sensor and the wheels together, write the decide step as a small state machine, and watch your robot avoid walls on its own.
- Making it your own: body, mounts and tidy wiringTurn a working prototype into a sturdy robot: where the weight should sit, how wheel size changes speed and force, 3D printing basics, ways to mount servos and sensors, and wiring that does not fall apart.
- Following a line with infrared sensorsHow a reflectance sensor tells black from white, calibrating two sensors, simple rules and smooth proportional steering, and what to do when the line is lost.
- Driving from your phone over Wi-FiThe robot opens its own Wi-Fi network and serves a small web page with drive buttons. You check every message before you obey it, and a watchdog stops the wheels when the phone goes quiet.
- Final project: debug, test and finish your robotA step-by-step method to find any fault, test the robot's decisions on your computer, then add a start button, a status LED and a stuck detector, and put your robot through a real test course.
Start to robotics pack
Everything for your first robot that drives itself: the beginner course, the Obstabot build guide and the Obstabot kit with all the parts.
- Robotics for Dummies€27
- Obstabot€12
- Obstabot€40.10
€59
Order by emailThe course and the guide arrive by email right after payment. The kit is posted as soon as kits are ready; we email you the date and the shipping cost first.
Try before you buy: the first lesson of every course and the first chapter of every guide are free.