I wanted to buy something remote controlled to turn into a paper made robot. Just for kids entertainment. I thought that something with wheels or even better with tracks would do the job. I searched for a car kit to assemble myself, and then refined my search into something with tracks to keep the steering as simple as possible.
I found a kit on an online shop that looked like something “assemble & play” and ordered it.
What I received was shocking. I got what I bought and not what I wanted to buy. It wasn’t “assemble & play” at all, but something based on a kind of micro controller board which turned to be an Arduino clone.
I was very annoyed excited by the discovery as the original need was still in place and instead of dealing with something simple to assemble and run, I had something that required to program with no clue about where to start.
Well, I went to Google, typed Arduino and clicked “I’m feeling lucky”.
I started from the official site, read some documentation, downloaded the IDE, and started with the basic example to understand whether the clone board was work reliably.
Later I bought an official Arduino Uno R3 to learn and practice. By the way, it is an Italian project!
Long story short, after a couple of days I got my robot up and running. I found it very interesting and had a lot of fun since then.
Now it’s time to build a P.K.E. meter, play with i2c OLED displays, and why not find a way to really detect ectoplasm!