FIRST Romi Robot and the Hour of Code broadcast

Romi Robot

A few weeks ago FIRST had their Hour of Code broadcast and we were very proud to be part of it. We unveiled the FIRST Romi Robot (that link is for a red version, but you can get other colors as well) that is available from Pololu Robotics and Education. This robot kit is very inexpensive and designed to help students learn about FRC programming. The robot kit has a two-wheeled design with a caster wheel on the front and back of the round chassis. Each of the two drive motors has a magnetic encoder to sense wheel rotation. The Romi control board has an integrated IMU with a 3-axis accelerometer and gyro for detecting robot movement and heading. There are 4 expansion ports to connect additional sensors or servos. In addition to the Romi Kit, you need to add a Raspberry Pi, a microSD card, and batteries to complete the robot.

Since it is fully supported by WPILib, the robot can be programmed using all the standard tools of the WPILib Suite including Visual Studio Code, the WPILib libraries, RobotBuilder, the dashboards, network tables, camera server, and more. This gives you the opportunity to practice writing WPILib robot programs, the same way you would on your full-sized roboRIO equipped robots.

Hour of Code Webcast Sample Programs

During the webcast we showed a few robot programs, one for the Romi and another for a small FRC robot. The working versions of the code for those available here:

A command-based Romi robot program that drove a fixed course and used the wheel encoders for driving fixed distances and making turns.

A command-based FRC Robot program Grant showed that used a camera and the WPILibPi Raspberry Pi image to navigate to a target, and deposit an object that was carried in an arm attached to the robot.

You can find the online documentation for setting up the FIRST Romi Robot in the WPILib documentation.