Adafruit Learning System

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ROBOTICS & CNC

62 GUIDES | 429 PAGES | 1 FEATURED | 26 POPULAR

Automation with Crickit and Capsela

Use vintage toys as modern fun with Crickit!

Capsela was a staple of childhood creativity in the mid-80's-90's. Motorized, you could build many things. Capsela and other toys can take on new lives by controlling their classic motors with modern, inexpensive robotics controllers such as Adafruit Crickit.

Crickit Controlled Animatronic Eyeball

Build a robot eye that looks in any direction!

Using two servos, the Crickit robotics platform, Circuit Playground Express, with cardboard and a ping pong ball, you can build an interactive all-seeing eye!

Crickit Carnival Bumper Bot

Make a bumper car that navigates by sense of touch. When it hits an object, it backs up, turns, and drives on!

Crickit and Circuit Playground Express control and drive this cardboard chassis, tail-dragger robot car. The accelerometer built into the CPX senses bumps, and the MakeCode program you'll create tells it to react and drive around things!

Crickit Collapsible House with MakeCode

Huff and Puff and Blow this House Down!

An animated house that can be blown over, only to pop right back up. Different setting allow the user to adjust how hard you have to blow to knock the house down. Great prop for re-telling the tale of the three little pigs, and a good introduction to programming in MakeCode.

Cam Follower Automaton

You can make this fun automaton that jumps up and down with cardboard, Crickit, Circuit Playground Express, and MakeCode!

Cams and followers are fundamental mechanisms to convert rotation to linear motion with interesting patterns. Different cam shapes produce different results!

Stumble-Bot

A simple walking robot that teaches basic programming skills

This robot can be made out of any wide, flat cardboard box. It uses household materials, two servo motors, 3 AA batteries, and CRICKIT for Circuit Playground Express to control its stumbling gait.

Tightrope Unicycle Bot

Step right up and build a robot that rides a unicycle on a tightrope!

Crickit and Circuit Playground Express drive a motor that rides the line! With a cardboard chassis designed to keep the pulley wheel right over the center of gravity, your circus robot will soar overhead with ease.

Controlling a Classic Nintendo R.O.B. Robot Using Circuit Playground Express

Forget finding an old CRT, R.O.B. the Robot can be controlled by you!

Nintendo released the R.O.B with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) back in 1985. Only two games ever used R.O.B.s capabilities and Nintendo shipped later units without R.O.B. Dust off your R.O.B. and control him with wirelessly with a simple CircuitPython program.

Animatronic Hand

Build a cardboard animatronic hand with independent finger control using CRICKIT robotics controller board!

Use the CRICKIT board with your Circuit Playground Express to control a cardboard animatroinc hand. Four servo motors pull the fingers into position using cable drive systems made from cord and straw guides. Program it all with CircuitPython to actuate as you press the capacitive touch controllers. You'll also learn to use the CRICKIT as an audio-animatronic controller with pre-programmed sounds and motions, such as counting in binary!

Introducing Adafruit Crickit #MakeRobotFriend

Make your robot pal who's fun to be with using Crickit!

Sometimes we wonder if robotics engineers ever watch movies. If they did, they'd know that making robots into slaves always ends up in a robot rebellion. Why even go down that path? Here at Adafruit we believe in making robots our friends!

Makey Paper Craft

Make a waving Makey for your Maker Faire booth!

by Ruiz Brothers

Use a Circuit Playground Express and Servo to create a Waving Makey robot friend for your Maker Fair Booth!

Drone Claw

Build a flying claw with Circuit Playground and Makecode!

by Ruiz Brothers

Use a light pipe to control a 3d printed claw with a Circuit Playground Express!

Motorized Turntable

"You spin me right round..."

Use 3D printing, a servo motor & CircuitPython to create a photography turntable. Spinning your subject will give your photos and videos extra flair.

Double-sided PCB Milling

Custom two-sided PCBs

by Ruiz Brothers

Learn how to use the Bantam Tools desktop CNC to make custom PCBs

Slider Crank Mechanism -- from Cardboard and Craft Sticks

Build a simple slider crank driven mechanism controlled with Circuit Playground Express

Use cardboard to build a slider crank linkage mechanism powered by a servo motor to control a slider crank mechanism. Program the Circuit Playground Express using MakeCode to control the motion and use it to build your own machines or animatronics.

Labo RC Car Action Lights

Customize your Nintendo Labo RC Car with vibration-triggered underglow

by C. Cunningham

Use Circuit Playground Express to trick out your Labo RC Car with with some sweet motion-activated lighting.

Using Servos With CircuitPython and Arduino

How to use servo motors with CircuitPython and Arduino

Learn how to connect a servo motor and control its movement with both CircuitPython and Arduino code.

Basic String Car Racer

A miniature race car is balanced precariously on a single pulley, speeding between two trees on a narrow zip line -- will your car win the race?

by Jan Goolsbey

The Basic String Car is a simple project that consists of a battery, motor, pulley, and a bit of fence wire. The initial design of the car was made from repurposed parts and materials found in Grandpa's basement workshop. This version uses some commercially-available parts, but could be hacked with parts gleaned from old CD players, for example. What modifications and improvements would you make?

Guardian Robot – Zelda BOTW

Now with micro servo and LEDs!

by Ruiz Brothers

3D Print a replica of a guardian robot from the video game, Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Unicorn Hat with Moving Ears

Really simple robotics and lights bring this mythical creature to life

by Erin St Blaine

Connect Circuit Playground to two mini servos and make unicorn ears that move! Control them with a mini joystick hidden in your pocket. Use Circuit Playground's onboard neopixels to add a glowing rainbow horn, and you're ready to ride out with the fairies.

My Mini Race Car

Bluetooth controlled, temperature sensing Formula E racer!

Zooooom! Now you can build and drive your own Mini Race Car using the Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE microcontroller. Keep an eye on racetrack telemetry with the included HTU21D-F temperature & humidity sensor breakout board.

CurieBot: Arduino 101 Mini Robot Rover

The powerful, 32-bit, Bluetooth enabled, three-layer robot of the future!

Build your own mini robot with the Arduino 101 board. This smart little 'bot contains a 32-bit Intel Curie module, Bluetooth LE capabilities, and a 6-axis accelerometer/gyro! Drive it with your phone, or turn over the controls to this capable robot's own decision making!!

AdaBox 002

Explore and use the contents of your AdaBox 002

by Tyler Cooper

With AdaBox 002, we are bringing you the fun and versatility of a small robot. Learn how to control your new robot friend with a phone and make it sing custom tunes. Learn how to make your new robot more intelligent and independent too!

Wizzy: A Needle Felted Cat

Create animatronic animals with attitude.

by Rick Winscot

Transform a handful of electronics into a fun, fuzzy, and fabulous needle felted animal.

Adafruit DRV8833 DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board

Chopper it up with current limiting motor control

Spin two DC motors or step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper with up to 1.2A per channel using the DRV8833. This motor driver chip is a nice alternative to the TB6612 driver. Like that chip, you get 2 full H-bridges, but this chip is better for low voltage uses (can run from 2.7V up to 10.8V motor power) and has built in current limiting capability. We set it up for 1A current limiting so you don't get more than 2A per chip, but you can also disable the current limiting, or change it to a different limit!

Circuit Playground Sound-Controlled Robot

Make your Circuit Playground mobile and change direction via sound

Circuit Playground makes the basis for a wonderful robot with two servo motors to move it. But how to tell it where to go? Maybe whistle or better use tones from another microcontroller.

Current Limiting Stepper Driver with DRV8871

Got big motors to drive? Call in the choppers!

This tutorial shows how to combine 2 DRV8871 motor drivers to create a high-performance "Chopper" style stepper driver. The current limiting feature of this H-bridge chip allows you to drive bigger motors, or squeeze more performance from your existing motors.

Adafruit Stepper + DC Motor FeatherWing

Make your feather motorized

A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing which will let you use 2 x bi-polar stepper motors or 4 x brushed DC motors (or 1 stepper and 2 DC motors). Since the FeatherWing only uses the I2C (SDA & SCL pins), it works with any and all Feathers- ATmega32u4, ATSAM M0 or ESP8266-based. You can stack it with any other FeatherWing or with itself (just make sure you have each wing with a unique I2C address)

Build an ESP8266 Mobile Robot

Learn how to make a mobile robot that you can easily control via WiFi!

In this guide, you will learn how to build your own mobile robot based on the ESP8266 WiFi chip. You will then be able to control the robot via WiFi, right from a nice interface on your computer!

Adafruit DRV8871 Brushed DC Motor Driver Breakout

Up to 45V and 3.6A of motor control

Crank up your robotics with powerful Adafruit DRV8871 motor driver breakout board. This motor driver has a lot of great specs that make it useful for a wide variety of mechatronics. In particular, the simple resistor-set current limiting and auto-magic PWM support make it super easy to use.

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