In 2015 the team at Robolink successfully ran a Kickstarter campaign for their Rokit Smart, a robot kit intended to teach coding and maker ideals. This year the company is running a successful Kickstarter campaign for Codrone, a drone kit that wants to teach coding.
Codrone can be programmed through the Arduino platform and a full curriculum to teach general programming and specific Codrone applications is already available in the Robolink community. The goal is to quickly get users up to speed on the syntax of coding and control, building up to advanced community projects or making user specific applications. Codrone can be controlled through an app available now for Android and coming soon for iOS, but the team prefers that you learn to fly autonomously through programming.
The drone itself is a quadcopter that fits in a 133 millimeter round footprint and weighs 37 grams. Bluetooth 4.0 connects the drone to the controller, with a lithium polymer battery that gives up to 8 minutes of flight time on a 40 minute charge. A three axis gyrometer, three axis accelerometer, infrared sensor, barometer sensor, and optical flow sensor are included in the kit to give inputs for autonomous flight. A 320 x 240 camera is included on this round of drones while future iterations while include higher resolution options.
Backers who opt for the Rover kit can remove the propellers and add gearboxes and wheels for a two wheeled stunting experience. This option is shown almost as an afterthought in the campaign video but really seems to add another dimension to the programming and drone experience.
Codrone is a great tool to teach programming and electronics to any level user, and will hopefully make an impact in an already crowded field of coding education products. The kit was chosen as a finalist in the 2016 Last Gadget Standing competition at CES, and has blown by its funding goal of $50,000. The campaign ends on March 6, 2016 and units are expected to ship in May 2016.