Joshua Lowe - Senior Editor4Tronix Mars Rover - Out of this world
About the Author:
Josh Lowe is the creator of EduBlocks, a project he started whilst he was a secondary school student. EduBlocks helps young people across the globe take their first steps with text-based programming, specifically Python, through a simple drag-and-drop coding interface. He is passionate about making technology and coding more accessible to kids and educators.
We see a lot of micro:bit robots here at micro:mag but this one is different. Have you ever wanted to own a working Mars Rover? Well, now you can with the 4Tronix Mars Rover kit.
At £120, this kit isn’t the cheapest micro:bit robot at all but it’s different to every other micro:bit robot. Most micro:bit robots follow the same formula of 2 wheels, a caster and a PCB chassis, whilst the Mars Rover from 4Tronix breaks this mould.
The rover has 6 wheels, of which 4 are DC motor-powered and a combination of servos and DC motors powers the other two.
The robot takes around three hours to build depending on how skilled you are at putting these kits together. We managed to build our kit with little issues and it was overall an enjoyable few hours. Some parts are fairly tricky but luckily 4Tronix have provided detailed build instructions with images.
This robot is excellent for climbing over obstacles due to it being six-wheel drive and the way the robot’s legs are constructed allows for it to drive over rocky terrain with ease.
The robot also includes an ultrasonic sensor which sits on top of the front of the robot and the sensor can tilted from left to right to control the line of sight.
4Tronix have provided an easy-to-use MakeCode extension which allows you to control all of the features of the rover, including the 4 neopixel LEDs. There’s no official MicroPython library yet, and this is something we’d like to see in the future, especially for a robot this expensive! However, we feel that for what you get, the price is very fair!
Our Rating:
9/10