Being the second OpenCat product, Bittle successfully brings all the best features of the previous robotic kitten, Nybble and all while packing them into a light, durable and compact body. Topped off with great potential for STEM education and researching.
Since Nybble’s release, a diverse OpenCat community of geeks, makers and researchers has been established. By joining the community on Petoi forum, Instagram or Twitter, you can find numerous Bittle tutorials and project ideas or share your own great ideas with the world just by searching @PetoiCamp
Design and hardware:
Bittle is a compact system of five major components: body frame, actuator, electronics, battery, and the software to coordinate all the hardware to perform varied tasks.
It’s a pleasure to assemble and disassemble Bittle for teaching or maintenance. On average, it takes about one hour to put together the body from scratch.
Bittle is designed to be durable, light and flexible, all at the same time. The Lightweight frame made of high quality plastic allows it to be very strong while weighing less than 280g. Furthermore, spring-loaded legs help Bittle to be stable and soft, and at the same time protecting the gears from external shock damage.
Custom made servos outperform most of the market competitors and ensure a longer life-time and higher durability for Bittle. However, as all brush motors have limited lifespans, replacements are available for purchase.
Bittle is driven by NyBoard V1, a customized Arduino board with rich peripherals. OpenCat fully utilizes a chip of a regular Arduino Uno to coordinate sophisticated motions. The board can drive at least 12 PWM servos, and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) is used for balancing. It stores “muscle memory” and detects body status (orientation and acceleration) which is also used for balancing. Bittle comes with an infrared remote to trigger basic movements. The board also listens to string commands from the serial port, such as “walk”, “sit”, or more detailed instructions for individual joints.
Thanks to the Arduino and Raspberry Pi community, there you can find many customization ideas for Bittle. There are four Seeed Grove sockets on NyBoard V1 for extensible modules.
Software
You can program Bittle at different levels in various coding environments, such as C in Arduino IDE and Python in the terminal. But, the most exciting part, is that you can use Codecraft to enhance its capabilities as a unique teaching tool! With a wide spectrum of curriculum that is updated regularly, you can start your kids learning programming with Bittle.
It’s also worth mentioning, that the same as MARK, Bittle will also get Code&Robots app support. This will allow you to manipulate it just from your phone!
Keep checking our blog and our shop for additional announcements as to when Bittle will be available for everyone!
But for now, fell free to visit Bittle Kickstarter page for additional information.
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