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Hey Everyone! Creative Robotix, now that’s what we like! Have you ever wanted to imagine, create and make your very own humanoid robot with its very own personality? We have, so we did, and we would like to share with you what we have done.

Our Creative Robotix educational platform is an open source platform designed for those who are interested in learning more about the next major market for technology, robots! Our platform provides a fun, hands-on, fully customisable and accessible experience which addresses core STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Maths) learning outcomes and is suitable for groups and individuals of any age to imagine, and create their very own robot.

Our educational platform is fully opensource and can be built from cheap off the shelf and readily available parts. By building a robot from basic parts you will lean about robotics, electronics, computing, 3D printing and modelling. While assembling the robot, you will be introduced to the basics in all these skills; you can chose to focus on a particular area by modifying any aspects of the design, such as personalising your robots face, body and arms with your own designs or decoration. Alternatively, you might like to upgrade your robots compute or sensing capabilities.

The platform is articulated with 5 low-cost servo motors, enabling differential drive with independent head and arm movements. An 8x8 LED matrix enables colourful facial expressions and the addition of buzzer allows your robot to ‘talk’ (like R2-D2 from Starwars) and sing a nice tune (including the theme from Starwars). The platform can also sense objects, such as lines on the floor and obstacles that are along its pathway. It is powered by an Arduino Nano and has Bluetooth connectivity, which allows you to program the platform to operate in a few different modes. In full autonomous mode the platform makes for a happy little robot independent and carefree, or you can connect the platform to your mobile phone for some interactive fun, in super smart mode, you can give your robot a ‘Brain the Size of a Planet’ (as Marvin, the Paranoid Android, a fictional character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams was said to have) and hook it into the cloud of things via your PC where it can access internet knowledge and talk to other cloud connected Creative Robotix robots out there and share experiences. The options are limitless.

Our design philosophy is based around the 21st Century Robot Project an open source, crowd sourced framework approach to building robots in the 21st Century where robot’s are imagined, designed and built to be social, to each have a name, to be community driven, connected, evolving, growing, improving over time, with each contribution and each iteration.

To get you started we’ve included a basic open source skin, CodEE. We encourage you to customise CodEE, with your own artistic skills, to give him his own personality, look and style, so why not print him out in white and let your artistic creativity go wild! Alternatively, why not dress him up, and take him out to see a show?

The Creative Robotix Educational Platform is skinnable, so why not show us your design skills and create a new robot character of your own, and perhaps write a creative story about your characters antics using some Science Fiction Prototyping, for more head on over to the Creative Science Foundation. To help your creative juices flow we have made other character skins for the platform, called RobEE, TimEE, TobEE (instructable to follow soon).

If you are technology minded, then why not try to find new ways to power our platform, perhaps with some of the latest advances in embedded technology, for example Pi-Zero-W and why not try out some other neat sensors, maybe a camera, positioning or even give our platform a sense of smell, or try out adding some other off-the-shelf technology you prefer. By evolving our design, creating your own robots, we hope that you will enter into the spirit of free-sharing by offering your designs back to the community so our Creative Robotix project can fulfill its vision for creating an an open source, crowd sourced approach to building and exploring the future of robotics with RobEE, TimEE, TobEE and Friends.

Finally, we wish you, “Happy Imagining, Happy Creating & Happy Making!”“

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