Postage Stamp-Sized Robot Created Using Raspberry Pi Microcontroller
The smallest Raspberry Pi robot yet, and unlikely to be beaten.
The Raspberry Pi single-board computers have allowed the creation of small robots, but one avid maker has taken robot miniaturization to the extreme.
As Tom’s Hardware reports, maker and computer vision enthusiast Kaiser, has posted a short video on Twitter showcasing his latest robot creation called Dot. The name is very fitting considering Dot is roughly the same size as a postage stamp. And if it’s not immediately obvious in the image above, that’s Dot sitting on top of a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B board.
Although details are sparse at the moment (Kaiser promises to share more soon), Dot uses the Piminori Tiny 2040 development board, which is designed around the RP2040 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and used for the Raspberry Pi Pico board. The Tiny is significantly smaller than the Pico, uses a USB-C connection, and includes 8MB of flash storage.
Dot uses two 3V geared DC motors connected to the GPIO on the Tiny board and draws power from a 70mAh Lithium-Polymer battery. As the video demonstrates, Dot has enough grunt to roll an AA battery around, while also having the ability to rotate and change direction. Kaiser used CircuitPython to program Dot, but is planning a switch to C++ for future development.
Pimonori created the Tiny 2040 because it “wanted something smaller and with a bunch more flash on board.” Now it’s been used for the smallest Raspberry Pi robot we’ve seen yet, and it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to create a smaller one without a new, smaller board is released. Let’s hope Dot turns into a project we can buy in kit form and put together ourselves.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
