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SKILL
LEVEL Ringo Educational Guide Rev04.1 ~ Plum Geek
Overview
Thank you!!
Thank you for your support in purchasing a Ringo robot. Ringo
began as a project I started with my son and daughter. We wanted
to design a robot together as a fun family project and only planned
to make a couple of them. The idea evolved into a Kickstarter campaign which
became very successful. We have been overwhelmed with the incredible community
support and encouragement we received along the way. We are very hopeful to
continue designing and producing many more robots in the future.
Your Ringo robot was assembled with love and care near Portland, Oregon. We had
most of the components sent from over seas, but we actually populate all the parts
on the board, as well as program and test right here in our own little shop. Most of
the assembly was performed by students we hired from our local Clark Community
Collage. We thank you for supporting a small business run by people of the Maker
movement, and we hope Ringo will provide you a fun learning experience and many
hours of entertainment. Cheers!
Acknowledgements
This guide will give you a quick orientation of the Ringo robot and how to program
him, but first we want to give a few acknowledgements. Ringo is Open Source
Hardware, which means his design is open to study and learn from. He wouldn’t
have been possible without others before us sharing their own open source
creations with the world.
We have produced several of Ringo’s primary systems based on open designs
from SparkFun and AdaFruit, and Ringo’s brain and programming environment
were brought to the world by Massimo Banzi and the other fine people behind
the Arduino project. Arduino has grown to become one of the most popular open
source development platforms in history thanks to the wonderful user community
which sprang up around the platform. Ringo’s motor design was inspired by the
Solar Popper robot produced by Solarbotics. Solarbotics is known for producing
BEAM robotics kits, which are robots that carry out rather complex behaviors yet
are based on very simple analog circuitry. Robotics physicist Mark Tilden is largely
credited for the creation of the BEAM robot movement. I guess what we’re saying
is that creations like Ringo are possible thanks to the open sharing of knowledge
between creative people. These fine people and many more we haven’t mentioned
have their fingerprints on Ringo as much as the people at Plum Geek.
We hope you will join us and continue in this spirit as you write
interesting software and create behaviors for Ringo that can be
shared and built upon in the community. We’re very excited to have
you along for the ride!
