I’ve been wanting to a build a robot for a long time.  The problem is that I can’t do hardware: when someone says, “well, just drop the electricity down from 5 volts to 3.3”, I am like what???  So when I saw the Robot Kit that can be programmed with a .NET MicroFramework, I knew I had to have it.  But I want more than just a disconnected programmable robot.  I want one that’s connected to the world.  I was inspired by brilliant folks at anybot.com and a belief that I can build one for a fraction of the $15k they want for theirs.

So to that end, my first project is to build a robot that’s can be controlled from the browser.  To make that happen, I needed the following:

1. The Robot Kit – purchased.
2. A Wi-Fi board – purchased.
3. A working, really low level, Web Server – more on that later .
4. A web app that’s served from the flash on the Robot Kit.

So a week ago I got the Robot Kit in the mail.  I put it together in about 20 minutes.  Installed all the necessary software (e.g. drivers, Visual Studio 2010, .NET MicroFramework, GHI Electronics libraries for the their chip).

Next, I plugged the robot in, created a small program (mostly taken from sample code), deployed it to the robot and let it fly. Here are the results of my effort.