Yeah, that was kind of the intention. Our kit was designed to be as easy as possible. It just has two motors, a sonar sensor, three IR sensors (for line detection) and a buzzer. The book that I wrote has to take an approach that makes it accessible to kids with no programming experience, but if you're familiar with C++, you'll be kicking ass in no time.
This is the exact sort of setup that I started with (professional engineer of 15 years). Two years ago when we started the program, we built it off of an Arduino and some Pololu kits. It was a great kit, but ended up costing about $150. After the success of our program in the schools, we spent the last year developing a custom PCB that has everything all built in. It has an ATmega328 chip, motor controllers, and sensors all pre-soldered on one board. It's still Arduino programming, but on our custom device. That got our manufacturing costs down to less than $50/kit and lets us sell the whole package to schools for about $100 per kid.
Now the hardest part, as I mentioned, is figuring out manufacturing at scale so that we can crank out thousands of these little suckers.
Send me an email (in my profile) and I'll get you a free copy of the ebook. I'd love some feedback from a programmer, if you're willing.
This is the exact sort of setup that I started with (professional engineer of 15 years). Two years ago when we started the program, we built it off of an Arduino and some Pololu kits. It was a great kit, but ended up costing about $150. After the success of our program in the schools, we spent the last year developing a custom PCB that has everything all built in. It has an ATmega328 chip, motor controllers, and sensors all pre-soldered on one board. It's still Arduino programming, but on our custom device. That got our manufacturing costs down to less than $50/kit and lets us sell the whole package to schools for about $100 per kid.
Now the hardest part, as I mentioned, is figuring out manufacturing at scale so that we can crank out thousands of these little suckers.
Send me an email (in my profile) and I'll get you a free copy of the ebook. I'd love some feedback from a programmer, if you're willing.