After five years of work, these ESP32 robots you can program in real time are ready for you to build
Summary
- The CoCube is a Lego-style coding kit that makes a tiny, cute ESP32 robot.
- It uses MicroBlocks, which lets you wirelessly send code in real time, tweaking its behavior instantly with no recompilation.
- It’s designed to teach people how to get into robots, starting with movement and moving to sensors.
If you want to get someone into tech, one of the best ways is to break it down so it’s as simple as making a Lego set. That’s the underlying mentality behind this adorable little robot, which took five years to come to fruition. All you need to do is put the pieces together, and you have your own little robot, and best of all, it can accept code wirelessly in real time without the need to recompile anything.
The CoCube is the cute robot you can program to do anything you want
It even has a little face on it
Over on the ESP32 subreddit, user ShuaiLiang2035 showed off what they’ve been tinkering with for the past five years. It’s called the CoCube, and the design choice is to make building a fully working robot as easy as putting together a Lego kit:
My core idea is to make robot programming as easy and intuitive as building with LEGO, while still leaving room for an almost unlimited variety of projects. Students can begin with simple movement and display activities, then continue exploring games, sensors, networking and multi-robot systems using the same platform.
CoCube runs off MicroBlocks, created by MIT Scratch legend John Maloney and his team. MicroBlocks lets you send code wirelessly to your devices without needing to rebuild or compile it, meaning you can tweak your CoCube’s code on the fly. As for the hardware, it runs off an ESP32-PICO-D4 with dual M10 motors.
If you want to see more about CoCube, check out the project’s Hackster page and maybe grab a kit from the CoCube website. If you’re more interested in what CoCube is built on, be sure to head over to the MicroBlocks website for the details.
