Humble Beginnings

5 min readMar 16, 2021

Here is the description of building a very simple robot from scratch, it’s based on a cool little robot kit found while googling around. It is called Red hat Co.Lab Robot Kit. It costs about $75 plus taxes and shipping on Sparkfun Website. You can order it here — Red Hat Co.Lab Robot Kit. The final total on arrival was $91 and change, shipping was fairly quick and it arrived on time so good experience with Sparkfun.

Here is a high level introduction from a Red Hat engineer Gina Likins — Introducing Red Hat Co.Lab Robot

I have become a fan of Gina after following her super detailed instructions and having a working robot in no time. Thank you Gina for being so good with instructions!!

Read Before You Start section carefully, it provides details of time needed, tools and materials you will need to complete the robot.

The most impressive thing about this kit is the step-by-step instructions and video tutorials linked to the Co.Lab robot kit, just follow along on very detailed steps. Read each section you are working on couple of times and watch the videos couple of times in that section as well. The most tricky parts during the assembly are:

Making sure which plate is the top plate and which one is bottom plate
Which side of each plate is the front of robot vs back
Which side of each plate is the top side [rough side] vs bottom side [shiny or glossy side]

After going through the whole process end-to-end, I can say that the instructions are written with painstaking care and it warns you about the typical mistakes you will make. I must say in spite of reading this multiple times and following instructions very closely, after mounting the motors we realized that the motors were pointing to other side of robot than what they should have been. No harm done, it was very easy to snap out the motor assembly and switch it around. The chassis or base is made out of laser cut plastic parts with one side slightly rough and the other side is glossy or shiny so you’ll be able to tell which one is correct side.

Here is how the kit looks right out of box:

Here is the list of contents from Sparkfun website:

The Robot was up and running in less than 2 hours. That included a bit of messing around with the Microsoft MakeCode which is a web browser based coding app. It was our first time using this app so instead of connecting to the MicroBit on the robot and downloading it directly there, we first downloaded the file on computer and tried to copy over to the Microbit as a drive but that didn’t work too well. Important thing to remember is — connect the USB cable with Microbit and when MakeCode prompts you to connect to device allow it to connect.

Initial hiccups and troubleshooting

First Issue — Robot Go, not yet!!

First time the robot was turned on by pressing the button A on the Microbit, it did not start the motors. Make sure you lift it up in your hands before you start so it doesn’t roll off the table. The issue was mainly related to the file copy while downloading it from MakeCode instead of downloading it directly on to Microbit via connection from MakeCode.

Second Issue — Robot Go, but just wants to turn around itself!!

After the initial issue was fixed, the robot wheels started turning, however the robot was turning in circles around itself. Luckily, the Sparkfun instructions had test & fix section and troubleshooting section that had exactly what was required to fix the issue.

The problem occurs when one motor is spinning in opposite direction to the other motor. There are multiple ways to fix the issue as described in the test & fix section.

We tried to first figure out which motor was not running in forward direction by lifting the robot and holding a pencil or pen lightly on the wheel as it turns. This should give you a good sense of which direction the wheel is turning. Also, watch the direction in which the robot is turning — if it is turning right, most likely the motor on left is working fine and the motor on right is either not turning or turning in reverse direction. Once you know which motor is turning in the reverse direction there are several option to fix the issue.

Try to reverse the wiring of +ve and -ve on the motor with issue
Switch the initialization flag in MakeCode for the motor with issue to opposite of what is for the other motor.

Once you have both the motors turning in straight line, play around with the motor speed and for loop to make the robot to do what you want to do. We tried to program the robot to go in square pattern by going a small distance, turning 90 degrees and then repeating that until it was back where it started. Sounds fairly simple but the robot actually traced a triangle pattern rather than a square pattern. Your experience may be different depending on where you are testing. e.g. on carpeted surface vs smooth surface like hardwood or vinyl floor. Also, the DC motors are not really controlled in a feedback loop fashion so when you send the motor a signal to turn, it is hard to control exactly how much the motor will move without having a sensor that controls the feedback and corrects the motion. This is expected of a open loop setup.

Overall it was a very fun and learning experience in getting the robot up and running and be able to program a few moves. It can be a really exciting project for anyone who wants to learn the basics of robotics. You can purchase more expensive robotic kits but this kit will teach you what are the bare essentials required for a robot to function with minimum setup. That is a very important part of learning robotics and no matter how complex robots you build in future, this experience will ground you in the foundations and you will always be able to make the connection with any future robots you build about which parts in this humble robot maps to the more complex ones you may build in future.

Hope this description helps you in either finding this cool robot kit or complete your project.

Humble Beginnings

Written by RoboFoundry