I decided to start www.kidsnbots.com for a few reasons. The most selfish is that I just love playing with geeky gadgetry. The other is that Andy, the resident 9 year old, needs to catch up if he ever wants to be as geeky as me! When I was younger, my dad did everything he could do to make sure I had enough tech toys to fulfill whatever strange nerd desire I had. When my needs outgrew your basic computers and hardware, he reached out to corporations to donate all sorts of cool hardware and software to continue my quest.
By the time I was in high school, I was building robots competitively. I had such high level gear that I was literally loaning hardware to the local community college I attended at night to learn things like microprocessor logic and C programming. These days the hardware and software that my father and I reached out for can be bought or even found for free just about anywhere. These days a hand me down computer, a good Linux distribution, $16 for a USB interface and a broken remote control car can make a heck of a weekend project. The only real roadblock is finding out how to put it all together.
Now I know that most of the fun I had was from figuring it all out. Back then the internet was $40 per month for 20 hours of access at 9600 baud and to be honest, there just wasn’t that much on it. Now you can find out how to do pretty much anything you could want to do!
The goal of this website is simple. I will have the blog, so you can follow the projects that Andy and I do, as well as others who want to contribute their projects. There will be a wiki that helps you to understand the terms, devices, software and hardware that we choose for our projects as well as many other standards to help you follow whatever tangent you find. There will be a forum so you can collaborate with other would be geek makers to make your projects bigger, better and wilder. Lastly, I will put together a store so the common project components can all be found easily in one place.
I hope that you enjoy this pet project of mine, and contribute to build a community of new, smarter and hopefully better informed budding geeks.
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