Servo - September 2015

I’ve been a toy designer for over 30 years. In the toy world, the KISS principle rules: Keep It Simple, Stupid. I have taught numerous programming classes at Mattel Toys and Otis College of Art & Design over the last 15 years to toy designers. Typically, my students are artists and creative types who are quite talented in visual design, but in many cases they don’t have much technical background; they do not aspire to become programmers. They rely on the company programmers and EEs who sit “over yonder” in a different group. I’ve always thought it was silly that blinking an LED was black magic to most designers. I’m convinced that a little bit of knowledge about electronics and computer chips is helpful for most people, so I put together an ‘Intro to Programming’ class. In two-hour sessions at Mattel, I had people flashing LEDs, moving servos, beeping speakers, and reading switches. At Otis, the students had harder assignments. They flashed LEDs to strobe their initials in a POV (persistence of vision) display, programmed a Simon-like game, and programmed a simple robot with bump switches.

In all cases, people learned a lot and they got hands-on experience making interactive products. Also in all cases, the language they learned to program in was BASIC. That’s the acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. From my experience, it’s still the easiest and most forgiving language for beginners to learn.

The PICAXE is my favorite chip for teaching and controlling the small robots shown in Figure 1. All those bots use the

There's no doubt about it, Arduino is everywhere. It's popular, it's modular, it's open source, it's readily available, and it's cheap. This well-proven soldier has won many battles in the microcontroller war. There are a variety of shields, sketches, and libraries to help people do what they want. In many cases, people don't even have to (learn to) program if they can find a sketch (a program) to do exactly what they want. The Arduino programs in its own version of C/C++ which is powerful and popular, but not the easiest for beginners to learn. There are brackets and voids and spaces and indents — all which must be just so. The sketch/program doesn't read very intuitively until you understand each command. Writing a program from scratch can be fairly daunting to beginners.

BASIC Bots &

By Eric Ostendorff Post comments on this section and find any associated files and/or downloads at www.servomagazine.com/index.php/magazine/article/september2015_Ostendorff.