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All posts by Eric Schweikardt

Eric is the CEO & Design Director at Modular Robotics.
We just launched Cubelets Console, a new way for you to play and learn with Cubelets.  It’s awesome.  Power up a few Cubelets and click the link on MacOS, Windows, or ChromeOS.  There’s nothing to download and install! If you’ve been playing with Cubelets for a while, you’ll be very aware that we’ve had a little ecosystem of different apps for different kinds of interaction.  One for programming in C on a laptop, another one for Blockly, and the mobile-only app which does other things like Remote Control and Personality Swap.  Now, Cubelets Console brings a ton of new functionality and interaction possibilities to laptops and desktops, at home or, when we get back to it, at school. Console replaces the Blockly and C programming apps and lets you do both at the same time.  It also lets you Personality Swap your Cubelets to change their behavior with pre-written programs.  Most exciting for me, though, is the new Data Logger interface.  Connect a Sense Cubelet or three and watch their block values change over time.  Add an Inverse and watch the complementary graphs.  See if your kid can make a sawtooth waveform with a distance sensor.  Track temperature or light data and export it to a CSV or a Google Sheet.  Experiment! I’m at home this afternoon and I noticed that although the sun is streaming in a couple of south-facing windows, our little cactus was in the shade between the windows, a temporary dark spot as the sun tracks across the sky.  I thought maybe I’d build a little self-driving car for the cactus.  You know, like Uber for plants! Cacti like to be in the sun, so I figured I’d start with a Drive Cubelet as the base and a couple of light sensors so that the robot knows where to go.  But before I put a plant on top of anything, I knew I’d want to ease the back-and-forth motion of the robot so that it didn’t come to a jarring stop when it found light and bounce the plant right off.  I thought it’d be elegant for the robot to slow its velocity along something like a sine wave.  Sin() is a bit heavy for a microcontroller, so I found a web site that generated lookup values for a sine wave and tried pasting a few of those data values into a Blockly program (sine-down.cubelet) that sine-waves down from 127 (half speed) every few seconds.  Then I found the magic of Console.  I switched quickly back over to Data Logger to verify that my code was working and saw these little approximated sine waves. Then I flashed the code into a Drive Cubelet and saw this: Looking good.  Next I attached a couple of light sensors and tried programming the Drive Cubelet as sort of a lopsided state machine.  If a light sensor has light, then drive toward it for a half second, slow down, and begin again.  It worked!  The little platform is successfully moving the cactus to the brightest sunshine.  It’d be fun to add a couple of distance sensors to make sure that the plant car doesn’t bump into anything or fall down the stairs, and maybe some down-low glow, but I’m pretty happy with this for now.   Where were we, anyway?  Right, Console!  Console is a huge upgrade to the high-ceiling Cubelets experience.  I was just doing distributed robot programming using multiple languages and leveraging inter-robot messaging schemes.  And it’s for kids!  It’s super cool to be able to sketch out a program in Blockly and then pop into C to understand the exact code that got created.  There are lots of ways to look at the same algorithm, and lots of ways to understand things.  Give Console a try and let us know what you build.  
We’re giving away free stuff!  Allow me to explain. We’re getting close to making the one millionth Cubelet.  Something about that number, that order of magnitude, has really given us pause and encouraged us to focus on the total life cycle of a Cubelet including where they end up in the end.  Cubelets are made of plastics and metals and magnets and circuit boards, and they shouldn’t end up in the landfill.  Especially a million of them. We do a lot of Cubelets re-use, like repairing broken Cubelets and using them in our demonstration kits, and now we’re trying to get really good at recycling Cubelets.  We’ve got a great set of tools for disassembling Cubelets.  Much of the material, like plastic, is efficient to recycle, while some, like circuit boards, we’re storing for a while until we figure out the best approach to dealing with it. The Bluetooth Hat is a faster, easier connection to the Cubelets app and Blockly coding, with reliable BLE technology. There’s a Cubelet type out there, the old Bluetooth Cubelet, that is probably not bringing joy to a lot of people.  It was hard to use and dropped connections a lot, so we replaced it with the totally awesome Bluetooth Hat in 2018.  The Bluetooth hat uses BLE so it pairs and re-pairs automatically, and it’s lightweight so doesn’t cause power brown-outs and disconnections, whether you’re on Mac, Android, Linux, iOS, or Windows.  We thought it’d be a great idea to give a new Bluetooth hat to people who have old Bluetooth Cubelets.  We’ll be able to properly recycle the old Cubelet, and someone who supported us early on could get a free upgrade that makes Cubelets feel new again.  There’s some amazing new Cubelets software coming soon, and you’re going to want a Hat to be able to play… We’re calling this the Bluetooth Trade-up Program.  We’ve allocated 100 new Bluetooth Hats; we’ll ship one to you if you’re among the first hundred people to claim yours here and then send us your old Bluetooth Cubelet.  One per customer, USA only.  Have at it!
I’m a pretty big fan of the Museum of Modern Art. It comes from my childhood. My Dad is a photographer, and one of his photos, a racing powerboat shot on a strip camera, is in the permanent collection. And my mom, for other reasons, thought MoMA was the bee’s knees and dragged me into the city a couple of times a year to traipse around the exhibits. When I was really little, I preferred the Museum of Natural History, but after a multi-year dinosaur (and Blue Whale) phase, I really started to like the work at MoMA, from the giant Jackson Pollock pieces to the outdoor sculpture garden to the Bell 47D1 helicopter hanging over the lobby. In my mom’s mind, MoMA symbolized the best of art and design, and I absorbed some of that feeling from her. In 2011, Cubelets were included in an exhibit called Talk To Me, about how objects can mediate and moderate communication.  It was an amazing feeling to stop by on a trip to New York and see them in the museum. Now Cubelets are for sale at the MoMA store.  If you want to give the gift of robot blocks for this holiday season, consider supporting one of the world’s finest cultural organizations while you’re at it and order them from the Museum of Modern Art!
I’ve been having a lot of fun at Modular Robotics lately.  It’s been a bit of a whirlwind with a lot of changes, a lot of new collaborators, a lot of new ideas, and a lot of creative problem solving.  It never occurred to me that we’d grow by acquiring other companies, but here we are: just a few weeks ago, we completed the transaction to merge with Dexter Industries and we’ve been busy integrating our new team members and making plans for the future. Dexter has been on my radar since about 2013.  Back then, they were making a bunch of interesting high-end sensors and extensions for LEGO Mindstorms, and I thought the idea was compelling: build on a commercially successful construction kit to enable kids (and AFOL) to explore further than the stock pieces and configuration allowed.  Dexter has grown and changed quite a bit since then, focusing over the last few years on mobile robots for education.  They’re still building off of the work of other successful projects; the Gigglebot, below, is built around a micro:bit and the GoPiGo, further down, is built around a Raspberry Pi. GiggleBot Up until a couple of years ago, we didn’t think much about teaching kids to code.  I feel strongly that the push to teach coding in elementary schools is misguided: that we should start with teaching computational thinking, away from a computer screen, and only get kids started coding when it starts to become something that they want or need to do in order to solve a problem or make something.  We hear all the time about how it’s important to teach little kids to code, but most of the time I think we’re hearing it from people who don’t really code themselves and see it naively as a step on the path to a good twenty-first century job. Those of us who write code every day know that it’s just one of many tools needed to design something.  It’s important to start from the beginning, with logic, computational thinking, and creativity, before moving to programming. I’m proud that Cubelets have been a big success at helping kids learn to think.  With Cubelets, kids as young as four are learning about things like feedback, control, loops, recursion, inputs/outputs, sensors, and networking all before they start programming.  Later, after kids learn the basics of programming, Cubelets are again a powerful tool: kids can code them to make complex distributed systems: concurrent models of cities, animals, and ecosystems.  But the complexity of Cubelets makes them not the best tool for the step in the middle: learning and practicing the basics of programming. Since Cubelets are a parallel system, they can quickly get complicated for learning to code.  It’s much easier to start small and code a simple robot than it is to code an interconnected mass of twenty! I first learned some programming in Logo.  My dad tells the story of coming to first grade parents’ night at Coleytown Elementary School in 1983 or so and seeing me demonstrate directing my little green turtle icon around on an Apple II screen with lines of code.  My dad likes to say that he saw the future that night. He went home and bought a Commodore 64, learned how to use it, and later, as a professional photographer, became an early adopter of digital imaging, Photoshop and image databases.  Anyway. Something about using code to create geometric patterns and illustrations was the bait that drew me in. A lot of people don’t know that the first Logo turtles were physical robots, not the familiar on-screen triangles.  Back in 1960 it wasn’t practical to have a physical robot for every kid, so we made do with on-screen simulations.  In 2019, it’s eminently practical, and the real-world behavior, tangibility, physicality, and connection to natural systems make robots an excellent tool for teaching kids to code. At first, we thought we’d design a coding robot from scratch.  Modular Robotics is a spinoff from an academic research lab at Carnegie Mellon University, and the desire to invent new things is part of our culture.  But after a few discussions with John Cole, Dexter’s founder and CEO, it was apparent that there was a better path right in front of us. On July 1, 2019, Modular Robotics bought Dexter Industries, and not only have we expanded the set of learn-to-code tools in our product line, we’ve got a great new team of experts to work with moving forward. John is a pretty amazing human being.  He started Dexter Industries in his kitchen, after working in alternative energy and a variety of other fields too.  He has an insatiable curiosity, combined with the capability to realize his crazy ideas, and that draws everyone toward wanting to work with him.  Over the last ten years he’s spent time in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, and many other places, and has some unique stories to tell. I’m honored and thrilled to have him on the Modular Robotics team as a close collaborator, along with the impressive collection of characters who make up the rest of the Dexter team. People seem to recoil a bit at the word “synergy”.  I think it gets thrown around too much in the business community and has lost some of its meaning.  But in the context of mergers and acquisitions, it has a very specific meaning. Putting our two companies together results in a lot of synergies; areas in which the best of one company can combine with the best of the other, creating a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts: a whole that’s more like the product of its parts.  By multiplying Modular Robotics’ operations, reach, design, education experience, and network with Dexter’s innovation, engineering, university programs, and coding robots, we’re way more effective than when both of us were out there trying to do everything on our own. If you still hate the word “synergy,” maybe try syzygy.  It’s a much cooler word.  Or zymurgy, which I fondly recall from being a little kid who read the dictionary, often backward.  Ok, sorry, I’m getting distracted. We’re making one awesome change immediately.  Starting today, all of the Dexter curricula, lesson plans, and activities will be available free of charge, under a Creative Commons license, for educators to download, remix, and re-use, however they desire.  It’s a treasure trove of awesome content and I’m psyched to get it into more teachers’ hands. The materials that the Dexter team have designed and built over the years are a direct fit with our mission, and making them available at no charge feels like a great way to quickly scale up and help many more kids become better thinkers. Other changes will be slower.  We’ve already got our design, education, and engineering teams collaborating on a couple of new Cubelets and some educational material to be launched early next year.  We’re starting in on a couple of top secret projects as well. For now, the Gigglebot, GoPiGo, BrickPi, GrovePi, and the rest of the new products will stay branded as Dexter Industries products.  When you place an order, it’ll ship from Modular Robotics in Boulder, Colorado, and when you email customer support, you’ll be reaching our new, combined team. I’m excited to share some fun new things in the coming months, but for now, we’re charging ahead and trying to break as few things as we can in the meantime. Zooming back out for a minute, I’m tremendously proud that our team was able to put this merger together, especially within the current context of quite a few IoT and consumer robotics companies (Anki, Jibo, Reach…) shutting down.  Casual observers might make an assumption that the consumer robotics market isn’t as promising as previously thought, but I’m certain that’s incorrect and that all of those companies were simply spending way more money than they were making.    Hardware is hard, no doubt, but as we get closer to shipping the millionth Cubelet, it feels like we’ve built a strong foundation helping kids become better thinkers.  This acquisition allows us to immediately scale up and impact a greater number of kids and a more diverse set of learners. I’m incredibly excited for what’s next.
We recently shipped out Cubelets kit number 100,000. It’s an arbitrary number, but I think cause for celebration. Something about another digit, an order of magnitude, reinforces that a hundred thousand is a pretty big number. The notion that we’ve made 100,000 boxed Cubelets kits is a little baffling when I think back through our history. I started on the design of Cubelets as part of my PhD research (we called them roBlocks back then) at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. Something about the little robot blocks caused imaginations to go into overdrive; one after another, people visiting our lab kept asking if I could make just a few more Cubelets; for their science center or children’s museum. After a visitor from Japan offered to pay a ridiculous amount of money for my (only) prototype set of Cubelets, we decided to try to figure out how to make more of them in a way that didn’t rely on me staying up all night soldering circuit boards. Here’s one of my favorite videos from the Cubelets Museum.  These were the first working prototypes of the design for mass production.  I had just returned from a trip to visit our injection mold supplier in China, and brought back these black prototypes.  I shot this video quickly on my desk, my friend Evan recorded the music, and I did a quick iMovie edit and posted the video.  Yesterday, our COO Jon Moyes and I were talking about the feeling of wonder, and he mentioned how vividly he remembered seeing this video in 2011 and deciding that he wanted to work for Modular Robotics. Even back then we were thinking about the future.  I remember a conversation with Brad Feld, one of our Directors, where we discussed orders of magnitude for product lines.  Back then, we posited that we’d make around 1000 Cubelets kits, then we’d parlay what we learned from that into the next product that we’d make 10,000 of (remember MOSS?).  And that eventually, we’d figure out robot blocks and design a product that sold 100,000 kits.  Here we are, eight years later, with 100,000 Cubelets kits out the door and increasing volumes each year.  We didn’t see that coming. From some perspectives, 100,000 is not a huge number.  When I was a little kid, it was a big deal for a car to reach 100,000 miles.  I remember when our big green Dodge van, Betsy, hit 100,000 miles.  The van only had five digits on the odometer; reaching 100,000 caused it to reset to zero.  But now some cars are making it to a million miles! For us, though, 100,000 Cubelets kits (that’s around 720,000 Cubelets, by the way) feels big, and feels like a reason to celebrate.  After all, the mission of Modular Robotics is to make the world a better place with thousands and thousands of tiny robots.  Explicit in that is broad impact through scale.  We see every day how Cubelets can help kids form thoughtful and accurate models of how the world works, and it feels like we’re on our way to helping create a critical mass of kids who can think about complex systems, networks, and emergence in ways that my generation clearly can’t. Here’s our most recent Cubelets video.  Some things have changed, but it’s surprising how much has not.
Indeed you can!  Do you know what a Turing Machine is? It’s a type of a computer, or, well, it’s a model of a computer. A simplified computer, with a memory tape and a read/write head that moves back and forth along the tape. It’s a funny little type of a computer, but it’s interesting in that with a Turing Machine, you can do any kind of digital computation that we can think of. Maybe not in a super optimized fashion, but… LOOK! Here’s a Turing Machine made with Cubelets and some LEGO bricks: This construction was built by Genaro J. Martínez and students and collaborators at ALIROB (Artificial Life Robotics Lab) in Mexico. I think it’s brilliant. There’s a web site with a few more videos and all of the code has been published there too. You’ll see a ton of neat little programming features in these robots:  Rotate Cubelets, for example, can only be controlled by specifying a speed, not a position.  Check out how they use a distance Cubelet as a “stop” to recalibrate the little swinging arm after each swing. Most of the Cubelets we make end up in elementary or middle school classrooms.   So we spend a lot of time working on making Cubelets accessible, educational, and intriguing: focusing on the low-threshold aspects more than the high-ceiling aspects.  It’s nice to be reminded that Cubelets are actually a universal computational material, a medium, capable of supporting some pretty advanced thought experiments.
One of the Modular Robotics projects I’m most proud of is the MOSS Huck Tank. It’s a MOSS kit designed with Huck Gee, one of my favorite artists. It’s gorgeous, and you can drive it around with your phone and shoot Nerf darts remotely! huck-main-moss Only 186 Huck Tanks will ever be made. Most of those went to fulfill the MOSS Kickstarter campaign, and severely tested the limits of the modbot Production and Operations team. We’re good at building MOSS, but we set up an entire pad printing production line to do the graphics. Pad printing is basically printing using a rubber stamp-ish tool. Anyway, there are ninety-four different “hits” from the pad printer in a single Huck Tank, and when we got into it, we realized that we had vastly underestimated the amount of time it would take to manufacture these beauties. Fast forward to today, and we’ve built and printed a final run of 55 MOSS Huck Tanks, using the last of the little shogun heads and shields in existence. Art collector? Robot enthusiast? Nerf assassin? Grab one of the last Huck Tanks while you can. Here’s a teaser video from three years ago showing a couple of different prototypes (sans shogun head), and the raw power of the Nerf cannon.
I was super happy to hear this morning that my friends have officially announced their new company: Misty Robotics. Robots as friends or as part of our families? I think it’s going to be an interesting ride watching them figure this idea out. I first met Ian Bernstein around 2009 or 10. We had just started Modular Robotics in Boulder, and Ian and his co-founder Adam dropped by our shop with half a prototype robot ball that had a bunch of wires sticking out of it. They were in Techstars at the time and wanted to talk about starting a hardware company. They’d eventually become Sphero. Since then, Sphero has become a huge success in the toy market, and between sprints, Ian and I have been able to do some bucket list skiing together: Alaska hili-skiing one year, Chamonix backcountry, Retallack… People often seem sort of amused to meet us on these trips and find that we have toy robot companies a couple of blocks apart in Boulder, but we’ve never felt like competitors. Now, Ian’s continuing to make his vision into reality by spinning off a new company, Misty, and closing a financing.  I’m excited for them.  While companies do indeed battle for space on store shelves, Ian and I are much more interested in the long view; when there will be an entire ecosystem of robot stuff all over our homes and offices. Thousands of tiny robot cubes doing some things, and “personable robots that benefit everyone’s lives” doing others. That’s why I’m so excited to meet the robots that roll out of Misty.

There are a lot of different ways to build with Cubelets.  Little kids, around 4 or 5, mostly like stacking them into tall towers and large constructions with flashing lights.  Older kids usually build with more focus, snapping together mobile robots that avoid walls or beep when they’re being chased.  Some people like remote-controlling their Cubelets robots with phones and tablets, and some people like integrating LEGO into their constructions.  Super enthusiasts with a lot of patience have been able to reprogram Cubelets in C, unlocking unlimited functionality at the price of a steep learning curve.

Now, using brand-new Cubelets Blockly, anyone can learn to program Cubelets and take robot blocks to a completely different level.  Blockly is a puzzle-piece programming language.  You drag programming pieces around on the screen in an easy interface, but still with all of the power and expandability that text-based typing languages provide.  Rad.  Purists and alpha geeks may still wish to write C programs using Cubelets Flash, but most of us at modbot are tending to use Blockly since it’s so fast for prototyping and quickly exploring ideas.

I just opened up Blockly on my Mac and wrote a simple program: the Paper Towel Dispenser.  An old standby.  You know, wave your hand in front of the sensor and the motor turns on for a few seconds?  It’s a super-simple version, but it worked on the first try!  The program looks like this:

Screen Shot 2016-10-26 at 11.22.42 AM

The program is written for a Distance Cubelet, so it monitors its distance sensor and then, when it detects a hand passing over it, sets its block_value to 200 for a couple of seconds.  I decided to write my program for the Distance Cubelet so that I could line up as many Drive Cubelets as I want to be a little conveyor belt and not have to program any of them.  I’m also dispensing a little aluminum ruler instead of paper towels, but that’s just a technicality.

It’d be easy to rewrite this program for a Drive Cubelet, and then I could stick on any type of Sensor Cubelet (not just Distance) and try to trigger the Drive.

Programming a whole pile of little robots instead of just one is an excellent way to see how there are often multiple ways to solve problems, and how small changes can have huge ripple effects in a complex system.

As I sit here enamored with my unimpressive ruler mover, Sam, our new Robotics Intern, is building a six-legged, catapult-equipped Cubelet/LEGO robot.  And he just finished documenting a Cubelets paper football goalpost robot with three levels of gameplay  which is pretty amazing.

pf finished bot

Programming and interacting with a whole bunch of tiny robots is different from working with just one.  Even though Cubelets Blockly is designed for kids, it contains some pretty advanced functionality.  With a multi-robot system like Cubelets, blocks need to send messages around to other blocks and things are happening in parallel.  We wrote a set of tutorials that highlights the key differences and walks you through building a few robots.

You’ll need a Bluetooth Cubelet and a few other Cubelets to play.  Today, Blockly runs on Macs and PCs, and we’re going to be launching iOS, Android and Chromebook versions later this year.

Happy hacking; let us know if you build something cool!

Know an amazing undergrad? Please point them in our direction. We have a new paid internship opportunity available for the Fall semester, and it’s a pretty good gig. We’re working hard on some new tools that support advanced Cubelets play: programming tools that will let you change the behavior of one, or more, or all of the Cubelets in a robot construction. The possibilities are, in fact, mathematically endless, and we’re looking for an Undergraduate Research Assistant to build a ton of robots and help us improve and iterate on the system. Why is the intern required to be a currently enrolled undergraduate student? Because through some of our research work, the National Science Foundation has agreed to pay for some of the intern’s compensation. Thanks NSF! Computer science students are obviously welcome, as are students in art, architecture, history, or anything at all. No programming experience is necessary, but if the idea of programming is scary, then this internship might not be a great fit. Creativity and energy are the two most important attributes we’ll look at when screening applicants.