Birthday Robot
Tomorrow (the 7th) is our son’s b-day - he’ll be turning 13. We got him a robot kit for his birthday and let him have it early - it’s called a BOE-Bot and I gotta say, I’m a little jealous. BOE is a pun of sorts, and stands for “Board of Education”. It’s basically a little circuit board with a little bitty processor on it, and I/O ports for various doo-dads, all mounted on a little metal chasis with a couple of servos and some wheels.
It comes with a programming environment for the PC and uses a variant of the BASIC programming language called P-BASIC. It also has a serial port, so it plugs right in to the computer for easy downloading of your programs.
Dominic (my son) has come to me a couple of times to help him debug a program (dang typo’s will get you ever times) or to help him figure some other thing out. It’s all I can do to let him learn and explore it on his own. It makes my geeky-father’s-heart swell with pride to see him programming his own robot that he built and wired up all on his own. ;)
I may have to get one of these for myself…hehe. If you’re interested in your own bot, you can get refurbs on e-bay for a LOT less than a new one costs.
MOB said,
August 7, 2006 @ 8:25 am
Oh man,
I had one of those probably almost 15 or 20 years ago now, they were awesome then! I can’t imagine how cool they must be now!
Good choice!
And I can’t believe he’s 13!!!
Happy Birthday!
MO’B
Allena said,
August 7, 2006 @ 2:38 pm
I found this gift and ordered it. Mom rocks! Dominic kept doubting that he would like his present, because I kept telling him it was black underwear with ones and zeros on it. Our geeky kid didn’t want binary underwear for his birthday. Someday I may not be able to buy him a present he likes but thus far I have nailed it everytime.
I would like to point out that you don’t have time to fiddle with a robot anymore than you do with a Linux machine. It would just sit there like the airplane I got for you. You will have to just share with the boy and in a few weeks you can have little geek fests together discussing the many merits of acurate variable declaration, and excellant code formatting. Who knows where it will lead.
When we are old then you can sit and fart around with robots and Linux machines to your little hearts content! Think how much cooler the technology will be then.
I have my sites set on sending the boy to work in two years, another 20K a year out of a 15 year old. Yippee! I figure a year of this, then I can move him onto something a little more marketable like C++ or C#. He’s mine until 18, I have plans, I have an agenda. I know how to accomplish my goals. It all starts with an innocent techie gift and ends with considerable cash flow improvement. HA HA Malevolent Mom strikes again!
Beau said,
August 7, 2006 @ 3:20 pm
Dear Readers (or, Mike as the case may be):
Please don’t be alarmed by the comments from Allena. The nice men in the white uniforms will be here soon, and we’ll take her somewhere she can get the attention and medical treatment that she needs.
We thank you for your support and prayers in this difficult time…
Beau
MO'B said,
August 8, 2006 @ 8:31 am
I fear pregnant women (in general) in hot temparatures.
Good? Bad? She’s the one with the gun…
(With all apologies to Bruce Campbell…)
MO’B