Welcome to the wonderful world of electronics and programming. With the Little Robot Friends, we wanted to create a fun and novel platform for goal-focused learning and experimentation - however, we’re not equipped for teaching ‘how to program’. Thankfully, there are lots of great online resources that can do just that. If you’re new to all of this, we encourage you to spend a couple hours to review the basics - just to make your early experiences with your robot that much more rewarding.

Arduino Programming Reference for the basics of Arduino and Programming
LadyAda's AVR Tutorial is great for general learning of microcontrollers
Intro to Physical Computing is Tom Igoe's wonderful world of electronics and how to mix them with other things
Jim's Computer Science Topics for learning more about programming and the c language

Introduction

So what is a Little Robot Friend? In it’s simplest description it’s a piece of electronic hardware with a cute form factor. Its brain is a microcontroller, a small simple computer in the form of a ‘chip’. Attached to that brain is a set of ‘sensors’ or ‘inputs’, electronic bits that react to different stimuli in the physical world. These sensors can detect human touch, the ambient light in the room, close and loud sounds, and pulses of infrared light. Also attached to that brain are ‘outputs’, electronic bits that react to signals sent from a microcontroller. These outputs are the LED eyes, the speaker mouth and an infrared LED for communicating with other robots. To learn more about your Little Robot Friend’s hardware, check out the chapter called Hardware Basics.

Even with its computer brain, sensors and outputs for interacting with the physical world, a Little Robot Friend is just a lifeless piece of hardware without ‘firmware’. Firmware is the set of instructions that tells the robot how to make sense of its inputs, how to control its outputs, and in what order it should do all of these things. This code library contains all the instructions that we’ve written to make your robot do its thing, however, we’ve also provided a way where you can add custom instructions to make your robot do new things too! For a more detailed overview of how our firmware works, check out the Firmware Basics chapter, and when you’re ready to add your own instructions check out our Tutorials.

What's an Arduino?

You keep mentioning ‘Arduino’ - what’s that all about? Arduino is a great platform for learning electronics and programming. It features a rich community of enthusiasts from a wide range of backgrounds. Whether you’re new to programming or have a engineering degree, there is something to learn over at Arduino’s website. Since it’s such a great platform for learning, we’ve designed Little Robot Friends to be ‘Arduino-compatible’. The robots brain is the same microcontroller used in Arduino hardware, and we’re written our libraries to use code that is similar to the code you see in Arduino projects. Another big aspect of this is the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This is the piece of software that is used to writing and uploading programs to Arduino hardware. We’ve made Little Robot Friends compatible with this environment, so the same tools you would use to program your robot can also be used on Arduino projects. If you’re starting your programming journey with Little Robot Friends, we hope you check out some Arduino projects too. If you’re already familiar with Arduino, then getting started with Little Robot Friends should be a breeze.

Installing the Arduino Software

The Arduino IDE software is free and open source and available on Arduino’s website. They have tons of instructions on how to install for different operating systems, so check out arduino.cc for details.

Installing USB Drivers

In order to get your Little Robot Friend talking to your computer, you’re going to need something that convert the LRF programming connector (TTL Serial) to USB. There are a variety of ways to do this - most popularly through our ‘Hacker Dock’. Depending on the type of operating system on your computer, you may need an additional piece of software called a ‘driver’ - a set of instructions that tells your computer how to communicate over USB to the robot. Here are a list of drivers required for different Serial to USB hardware:

LRF Dock Driver (Windows XP / Windows 7 / Windows 8)
FTDI Serial-to-usb adaptor Driver (if you're using a dongle with FTDI chip)

Now you’re ready to install the Little Robot Friends library and get to programming your robot!