Sphero Launches Robot With Programmable LED Panel, IR Support
Sphero started out making products that were toys first and foremost,
but its tiny personal robots have slowly become more education-oriented,
and the new Bolt is the most bookish of them all. The Bolt is a
transparent spherical robot with a raft of sensors and a programmable
LED matrix display.
The Bolt is an upgraded version of the Spark, which
SpheroSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce launched back in 2016. The
LED display under the robot’s transparent housing is the most obvious
change. The 8 x 8 matrix has some built-in functionality like showing a
smiley face when the robot completes an action or showing an arrow to
tell you which direction the round robot is moving. The LEDs are
animated, fully programmable, and can display real-time data. You’ll
need to dig into the programming features of the Bolt to make the LEDs
do anything fancy, though.
Sphero included several new sensors in this device. There’s a compass,
which means better orientation control when programming tasks. There’s
also an ambient light sensor and four internal infrared sensors. The IR
capability theoretically allows multiple robots to communicate with each
other. This is the first Sphero product that includes an option for
multiple robots to interact. The company says as many as five robots can
link up to work together within a radius of five meters, but it’s vague
on the supported functionality. The demo video shows the robots
recognizing each other with LED animations and rolling along as a single
unit.
There are two apps for controlling and managing your robot over
Bluetooth. The Sphero Play app is just a controller for moving the robot
around and interacting with the built-in games. It has both joystick
and accelerometer controls. The Sphero Edu app lets you create your own
programs for the robot. It includes three different “levels” or
programming starting with simple drawing mode, progressing to blocks
(like MIT App Inventor), and ending with full text-based programming
with JavaScript. This is also where you can go to view and export full
sensor data from the robot. Sphero also has learning tools for teachers
to assign programming experiments (with Google Classroom support) on the
Bolt as well. Sphero clearly hopes schools will buy a few dozen of
these for students.
The Bolt is on sale right now on the Sphero website for $150. It will come to select retailers later this month.
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