The Society’s UKMARSBOT is a flexible design intended to help beginners get into small robotics – especially for contests like line follower and micromouse maze events. The stock controller is an Arduino Nano but it can easily be replaced with a more powerful and flexible alternative.
Each month, UKMARS holds an online meeting with a short presentation as its main focus. The December 2020 meeting featured one of the designers – Peter Harrison – describing some of the thinking behind the original design and its limitations. Peter then goes on to describe some of the newer alternatives to the Arduino Nano. In particular, the Arduino Nano33 BLE has a 9 axis IMU and a powerful Cortex M4 processor with hardware floating point and Bluetooth communications.
Only minor changes are needed to the stock robot in order to fit one of these upgrades. Watch the presentation now: