Making the Reconbots for Intel at Maker Faire Bay Area 2016

This year Intel and Bocoup joined forces to show what you can do at home with the Intel Edison and Johnny-Five. We built a roving robot with streaming video and touchscreen controls in a few days using off-the-shelf parts and under 600 lines of code. We named it Reconbot.

Build and drive a robot with your phone. @ReconBot #Intel #MFBA16 pic.twitter.com/WLSrN86geo

— Intel (@intel) May 22, 2016

We’ll be releasing a full walkthrough on how to build your own Reconbot in the coming weeks. (In time for nodebots day!) It’s not a beginner’s build as the power requirements are complex and the Edison requires a bit of work to set up. If you’re an intermediate maker, it should take about three hours to assemble the hardware.

The Reconbot takes advantage of Johnny-Five’s ability to work on any platform. We were able to prototype Reconbot using our laptops and an Arduino Uno. When we were ready for production, we moved to the Intel Edison with no application code changes. We also have examples using Resin.io to allow for simple git push deploys and updates.

You’ll find the code and eventual build guide on our Reconbot GitHub repository.

We really enjoyed working with Intel at Maker faire and look forward to doing it again soon.