Twelve-year-old maker Quin already has a company of his own–Qtechknow. He founded a hackerspace in his garage on California’s Central Coast. He helps teach Arduino classes for kids and adults. And he developed the “gas cap,” a baseball hat that detects human methane emissions. (What 12-year-old wouldn’t want that?) And now he’s created the FuzzBot, a cool little robot that not only turns on a dime to avoid obstacles, it helps his mom out by dragging a dust cloth as it makes its rounds.
To build the bot, Quin used the Pololu ZumoBot Chassis Kit for Arduino, an Arduino Leonardo, a pan/tilt small servo, and a Parallax Ping Ultrasonic Distance Sensor. He used wire to attach the servo to the chassis and hot glue to secure the Ping sensor to the top of the servo. He programmed most of the code himself using the Arduino IDE, the ZumoBot library, and the Ping library for Arduino.
“I was interested in the ZumoBot Chassis because of the tracks, which I have never used in a robotics project before,” he says. “I used the Swiffer Duster add-on so that my mom wouldn’t have to clean the floors as often! I like it because it has the personality of a pet, but instead of leaving fur and pawprints everywhere, it picks up dust instead.”
Quin is also planning to be at Maker Faire Bay Area next month talking about his “open source education” in which he’ll share his experiences teaching Arduino classes, starting a hackerspace, founding his own company selling electronics kits, and his immersion in open source hardware/software.
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