today I'm looking at this contents of this
box that Elecrow sent me with for review it is supposed to be a stem kit is what
they called it stem being science technology engineering and math I believe so let's see
what they sent me in here oh goodies pen 3D printed no laser cut will go okay notebook okay
here here is the main event it is the crowbot bolt programmed educational robot car what's in the
box it says there's a bolt car and a joystick in the Box various different features we'll get into
that later I just want to get in the box and see what this guy looks like documentation looks like
some assembly instructions that's good um how to use remote control ah and a track because it one
of the things that it can do is line following so it's got a sample and a wine following track
okay let's get back to unboxing we have a whole bunch of things in here okay uh let me just dump
these out and then I'll quickly go through them so it's definitely a kit it was a little bit uh
worried when I looked at the picture on the box thinking it wouldn't be but it's definitely
a kit and this looks like the mean board so on this side of the board we have some pins to
plug stuff into some couple of light sensors IR receiver obviously a couple of DC motors
that's pretty cool a connector labeled battery um a handful of inductors over there and
some six pin five pin devices I guess okay over this side the brains of the operation that
is an esp32 oh very cool nice and Powerful which means this thing has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I
believe the esp32 has Bluetooth as well okay and then we have a couple push button switches
and on off switch 16 pin chip down here which is a ch340 USB interface no doubt for programming
that guy okay and on the other side we have the USB we have some RGB LEDs a little
ball bearing wheel kind of thing a couple of animal a couple of uh you know
ports um got I squared C couple of uh gpio is five volts and ground over there and on
the digital five volts ground and a couple more gpios okay moving further along another
couple of power supply looking components um buzzer is there a buzzer on the other side
that's probably what that guy is something I thought it was an inductor but it's probably a
speaker thing cool and a couple more connectors one of them got dim oh those aren't connectors
those are uh reflective infrared sensors okay let me just see if I can straighten that one
up because it obviously got beat up in shipping there that'll do and then a couple more
RGB LEDs on the corner essentially it's a development board but with motors on it
which no doubt connect to these wheels other large anti-static bag has this
switch looks like a remote control we have at joystick we have what is that chip in the
middle there it's another esp32 in addition to that we have like I said the joystick a d-pad
here a couple of shoulder switches on off USB um is this yeah it is another ch340
so this guy obviously can be user programmed as well that's cool uh
we have some I squared C 5 volt ground and a couple of GPA over there
another one of those little speakers um I don't know what that is is that a rumble
motor maybe that'd be cool and on the back uh two Triple A's right there's a lot of power in
this little kit now let's see what else we have we have an ultrasonic module very standard
ultrasonic distance finding module so for this one it's mounted in a cat face well that's pretty
cool clearly we have a standard little infrared remote back here okay uh that seems reasonable
enough uh what else we got here some push button caps right uh some cables standard USB cable
what is this LCD or OLED or something similar okay I assume that connects up via these to one of
those i o ports on there and then the other things that we've got looks like some laser cut acrylic
for structural bits and pieces that's the same shape as the remote control let's just yeah okay
that makes sense there that goes over there sure um this one has a battery box in it
and some more acrylic cut uh stuff with the bolt logo on it right so that goes with
that guy probably more screws and standoffs and a few more acrylic pieces this little lightning
bolt Motif shows up all over the place oh yeah and there was a screwdriver in there too forgot about
that so that is all the bits and pieces we need to assemble it so this is fairly clever how this
thing goes together the tabs on the circuit board just go around those little slots cut into the
acrylic that little front piece tabs onto there the battery box has tabs in the side of it as well
let me just make sure that switch is turned off so that plugs in there and it's keyed
so you can't get it wrong that's good now this connects on here and this is the part
where you probably want an extra pair of hands if it was a kid doing this and that is really who
the target market for this thing is is for kids it is an education kit after all those will go on
there and then this piece goes on on this side I said this would be a lot easier
with an extra pair of hands but as you can see it is possible for one
fumble old guy to do it by himself as well so there that's all snapped together now
just the other two screws into these really long standoffs that are holding it together the only downside of this design that
I can see is that when it comes time to replace the batteries you got
to take the whole thing apart but realistically how long did that take you
to put it back together that's not too bad and there you go the body of that guy has done
the only thing left is to put the ultrasonic sensor on the front here and it just plugs into
its gpao position thunk there it is complete so the instruction sheet that comes with it
doesn't show anything about putting the remote control together but it's fairly straightforward
there's no fancy uh arrangements or anything it's just a matter of putting the standoffs in the
places that there are holes for the standoffs and there's four holes on the front for the standoffs
only two holes in the back by the looks of it four standoffs yeah pretty straightforward
and that just drops down over there and it looks like the two outboard screws get
mounted now the other two hold the back piece on oh we got different lengths of screws going on
here so the bag says there should be two different lengths of M3 screws however to me it looks like
they are all the same length fortunately I do have some M3 screws that are a little bit shorter
certainly not the end of the world but just something to look out for when you're building
this if this happens again I have to assume that that was just an accident in the packing then
it's not a habitual problem because they did have them labeled properly on the bags there
you go got there in the end oh no not too bad I guess we should put the buttons on that
though Gotta Have buttons on your joystick uh do we have colors do we care about the
colors I suppose we could follow the colors that they use in the manual that I found on
their website so right on top blue in the bottom ah and those have to go on before okay
well I'll just unscrew these and put that on there then fine be like that oh and also that
LCD goes on the remote control so I guess I should plug that in before I put the cover back
on again that looks like it just goes right there that on and then reinsert these
screws hopefully for the last time unless I've missed something
else but I don't think so this time all right that's that and the last thing
is these little white button caps on the two shoulder buttons toss the batteries into
the back switch it on and see what happens hey cool it's got some graphics it's chirping a little Bluetooth symbol and it's chirping so
I'm assuming that means it's trying to find this guy over Bluetooth cool well we'll shut him off
for now and well let's uh I haven't programmed this thing let's see if it comes with any Factory
software on it so the power switch is back there as lights come on everywhere okay power this guy on let's see what happens
oh this little Bluetooth LED over here okay we probably need to put software on
something or other I would expect but let's just see if it responds to this I probably should read the instructions but I'm
not going to is there battery in this ah there's no battery in it so now let's try it now there's
a battery in here uh cr2025 just for reference there is a little infrared sensor on
there so oh it chirps when I do that hey okay cool oh wow okay stop it's got programs in it and
everything and if I'd paid attention to this paperwork that came with it I would
have seen that it has some Factory procedures so number one is just ultrasonic obstacle
avoidance number two is line tracking number three is light Chaser number four is music playing
that we can do oh and zero is robot on patrol and then five six seven eight we can
customize cool buzzers lights okay oh I did not know that those
came on like that all right that's buzzer right uh music playing robot four foreign [Music] and that does use the RGB LEDs on the bottom
as well as there's RGB LEDs in there okay I've never seen ultrasonic sensors that have
LEDs on board that is cool anyway whatever you want any Christmas music quite yet soon
but not quite yet let's try line Chaser mode okay that works that definitely works cool let's try this late uh following mode okay
so if that corner in that corner okay so it sort of follows the corners that's pretty
cool you got to be pretty close though and of course you can steer it around just
with the remote control forward and back so that is all of the factory pre-programmed
uh things that it can do which is pretty cool but there's a lot more that you can do and that's
where the USB cable comes in because this isn't esp32 in there so we can reprogram it if we want
to and the programming instructions along with a full the full manual and a whole bunch of uh
of experiments and lessons and stuff is all available to download from the website where you
purchase this thing from the kit that I got just for reference is 57.80 including both infrared
and the joystick and of course the robot car itself but we don't at the bottom of that page
there's all this downloadable stuff there's a Wiki there's the assembly instructions which
we just followed we have the beginner's guide and we have the lesson code and those are the two
things that you'll want to download to actually play with this thing so here is the 52 page
manual that you can download from that link and it really goes through a whole bunch
of stuff as you can see I'll just slowly scroll through the contents here so there are
three different ways you can program this you can use let's code software which is their
customized version of scratch if you haven't encountered it before scratch is a something
that MIT yeah that MIT put together as a young kid's beginning programming language it's a
graphical language it's drag and drop it is very slick and my kids both played with it
when they were younger as well without any help from me they just started creating stuff in
it so it is quite intuitive to use for younger kids and that's who's designed for there's a
full set of instructions on how to download it it is cross-platform Windows Mac and Pi now I
tried to install it on the ancient Pi 3B that I've got around here and it installed but it didn't
want to run and I don't think it's the software's problem because I couldn't get just plain vanilla
scratch to run either on that ancient pie so I'm not going to blame it on the software but
there's also Windows and Mac versions however I don't have either of those around here so I'm
going to go on to demonstrate a few different options one of which being using Arduino and again
I could do that but I'm not going to I'm going to go with the third option which is python micro
python specifically because this is an esp32 it can run micro Python and since I've already got
thony installed on my computer although they do have instructions linked from their web page
on how to install it yourself that is what I'm going to use now according to that document
I need to go in tools options interpreter set that to esp32 which makes sense
select the port install firmware [Music] browse to our firmware which is in where to put it and this is all downloadable from that same
website all the different firmware that you need for running all the projects let's install
that now we can close that and okay that let's get some python code we just get lesson one
and see what it does so there's an activate script there let's send that one actually
we should really just run that shouldn't we yes it says hello master down there okay and then
I have to push a button oh okay it's that button in the corner well that makes sense I guess so
let's start running that it says hello master a little creepy but whatever I'll push that button
and it says there we go it's activated woohoo so we can load Python scripts on there I'm scrolling
down through the manual this is what that lets code looks like and that is the same project that
we just did a project in quotation marks it's basically the hello world of the thing but that's
what it looks like in let's code we already saw what it looked like in Python and here is what
it looks like in Arduino code and all three are available from the same zip download file from the
website each lesson also comes with a challenge and this is what the challenge looks like um not quite sure why they call it a challenge
but it's a second lesson at the same level this one uses delays or in Python sleeps so
after that we could go through all 16 of the lessons I'm not going to do that on here they're
all on the website if you want to look at them and in the manual it shows the let's code examples
and of course as I showed there's also Arduino and micro python code available at the same download
angry bolt what does that do oh okay it's uh monitoring the ultrasonic let's do that one so
let's just start that one running on the bolt and that okay and it looks like we have
to tap the program start button each time and it is showing us the
distance from my hand that's cool oh and notice the colors change
as things get closer too that's pretty cool let's see what color
of emotion does if we run that one instead whoa where are you going okay it tries to run away if you get
close to it it's making noise that's fun so this is a pretty cool little thing actually
come back this way there we go um it's yeah I like it um and it's a powerful little guy too
with the esp32s in there I'm gonna have to look more into this guy because I didn't really spend
enough time playing with it it's an added option um the basic kit just comes with
these pieces here and I think these what do they call them croattail adapters
for adding extra modules onto there uh I will leave all the links
down below as I've said already thanks for watching thanks to ohakro for sending
this to me to play with I will talk to you later
