Introduction

So how do we take our products here that we've taken apart-- except for the bottle, which is just a recycled good-- and we want to see if we can create value by building something new out of the parts that we've taken out of all these different components here. So what we've done is we've designed a new product that's kind of designed to get kids excited about math and science, and in order for all these products to work for us, we need to incorporate some electronics. So we have an Arduino. It's a basically programmable chip that you can easily wire to other components. It's great for prototyping. And we have a L298 chip, which is this guy, on a motor control. It's set up as a motor controller here, and the board that you can see here comes as a kit. So we put that together, and that'll allow us to control the speed and direction of motors so that we can move our little bot around. And then we have a little sound chip here, and so that allows us to record and playback sound. And so we'll control everything with the Arduino. The motor controller will let us drive motors around, and then this guy will help us to record and play back sound. And we're going to use some of the parts from these products to make something cool. So after three weeks of development, we've come up with Bit-Zee Bot. Bit-Zee is a little programmable robot that drives around and has a little personality. You can control Bit-Zee with a universal remote control-- the one that we took apart, actually. And that sends a signal right here to the IR sensor. And then that communicates with the Arduino board and tells the Arduino board that it just got a signal. And the Arduino can turn on and off different functions, so we can make Bit-Zee do a little dance, make its lights come on. And Bit-Zee has a couple of switches here. There's a switch here and a switch here, and those came out of the radio. And then you can that Bit-Zee's nose came from a bottle cap, and its eyes came from a bottle cap. And the power for Bit-Zee is just some batteries that you can get from Radio Shack in a battery holder, and the motors came from the hair dryer. So here's one of the hair dryer motors. And basically, we use that as a wheel to push Bit-Zee around. Bit-Zee's also got the ability to record and play back sound, so we use that, and you can use the remote control to trigger that function. We've also got a motor controller here, and that, of course, allows us to control the motors, the speed, and direction. The camera that we took apart, we mounted to the board here, and that came out of this camera. And you can use that to take photos of things. And again, the Arduino controls that, and we control the Arduino with the remote control. And you can see there's what's called a bread board here, and that's where all the wires go to basically to allow us to connect more things to the Arduino And we have a number of resistors and transistors here. The resistors limit current flow, and the transistors are functioning as switches, so they allow us to control different devices, again, with our Arduino here. So this is Bit-Zee, and Bit-Zee has got a personality. You can see Bit-Zee lights up and does different things when it gets its bumper pressed or when it bumps into something. So we're going to show you more about Bit-Zee in the next few sessions.