Micro:bit "Nature Anatomy" Robots

I've been lucky enough to get to spend a lot of time with my young son trying out tinkering projects and ideas. Over the last year we built a giant cardboard beetle, repaired a broken lucky cat, played with solar panels, tried squishy circuits and sent hundreds of duplo cars down a honeycomb cardboard ramp. 

I’ve been amazed at the way he thinks about ideas, focuses deeply on materials and internalizes the process of building things. It's so cool to see how story-telling and imagination take center stage in the process. I try to say yes to his prompts if possible so the other day when he told me he wanted to make a robot squirrel, I thought ok lets give it a try. 

I gathered up a few materials like micro:bit, servo motors, alligator clip wires to pins, cardboard, masking tape and paper and crayons. We took inspiration from one of our favorite books, Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman for the design and grabbed some crayons and paper to sketch out an eastern gray squirrel. 

We experimented a bit with the design as I tried to understand what he meant when he moved the motor around saying I want it to go like this. Although he’s too young to do the makecode programming it was really cool to see how he started to understand that the instructions go from the computer to the board and that you can make quick changes to test rapidly. He started to share ideas on how he wanted it to function and we ended up with a sound sensing animal robot. 

Of course this initial experiment led to so many new ideas. As he went to bed that night we flipped through Nature Anatomy and on every animal he said, “I want to make a robot of that”. So we were off on our quest. The next idea that we explored was a little blue atlantic crab with snapping claws. It was fun to think about what kind of animals (turtles, crabs, beetles) lend themselves to this type of mechanism because there’s a natural place to hide the board and discreet motions. 

The crab let us explore the idea of ‘remote control’ with the buttons on the micro:bit triggering each of the claws. It was really fun to play with the crab and make it come to life with the onboard buttons. 

Our latest experiment came from a different direction but led back to something similar. He told me that he wanted to build a remote control car. I thought that it would be fun to experiment a bit with the radio function of the micro:bit and build our own. 

It was actually a lot easier than I thought and in an hour or two we had a little robot and another controller that could go forward, back and reverse. I think it could be really interesting to build on this idea to add in other functions and complications. And of course it would be really fun to add in the personality of another animal out of Julia Rothman’s book. 

I see these projects as a bit of a lower threshold Robot Petting Zoo both because the combination of microbit and makecode has been getting easier and easier to use and also with the addition of a few special parts. The first is a little set of cables that go from pins to alligator clips. With these colored wires the servo motors can interface easily with the board. Also using little lithium ion batteries gives enough power to run two motors in a really small and embeddable package. Making the animals basically 2D at first is also helpful to keep things a little bit more simple and easy to handle. 

I wouldn’t say that although it’s not really a project for three to six year olds, making these creatures is definitely a good starting point where even the youngest tinkerers can do some of the designing, talk through how they want the robot to function and help with the construction. Maybe making everything bigger and figuring out some simpler connection points would be a good next step. I’m looking forward to continuing to experiment with these simple natural robot prototypes.