Have you considered making a thru hole 3pi robot kit? I think this could appeal to some people that have little experience soldering and assembling components.
Hello,
Thanks for your suggestion. The 3pi design is pretty dense (almost 100 surface-mount parts), and many of the parts aren’t available through-hole, so we wouldn’t be able to really change the design to more through-hole parts without substantially changing the robot. We’ve thought about making the robot available as a kit in which just the existing through-hole and mechanical parts would get assembled by the customer, but that would make testing of our surface-mount only sub-assembly pretty complicated. With the relative complexity of the design, even the existing through-hole assembly might be frustrating for those with little soldering experience.
Would you (or anyone else reading this) be interested in the 3pi as it is in kit form, with all of the SMT parts already pre-populated?
- Jan
I didn’t realize how many parts you had on the 3Pi until you mentioned it and I looked closely at the pictures. I am not sure if it would be worthwhile to make a unassembled kit if it would be difficult for a beginner to solder.
The reason I was thinking about this is I have some friends that are interested in robotics and would like to learn more than just how to program a robot. I was thinking a thru hole robot that they can assemble from scratch and easily program could be a good place to start. If it would be hard for a beginner to assemble I don’t think it would be as useful or fun for them though.
Hello Brian,
I suggest taking a look at our projects page. We have some projects for building robots from scratch and also adding components to 3pis.
- Ryan