12 year old CEO shows off Atmel powered robots

Meet Quin, CEO and founder of QTechKnow. Unlike most CEOs, Quin is just 12 years old, but that hasn’t stopped him from running a wildly successful electronics blog, his own YouTube channel and amassing a ton of loyal friends and fans on Twitter. The mini maker has a major passion for electronics and especially Arduino, having racked up a plethora of advanced projects and even making his own PCBs.

Atmel caught up with Quin at Maker Faire in San Mateo last weekend to examine a couple of his creations, the Fuzzbot and the Android DiceBot.

Fuzzbot is an awesome, fast, fully autonomous small Arduino robot which uses the compact Pololu ZumoBot Chassis kit for a great drive system, and uses a Parallax Ping sensor to sense proximity, to make it fully autonomous.

Quin says he likes to think of the Fuzzbot as a cheap and hackable “mini Roomba” because it uses a Swiffer Duster on the back to pick up any unwanted dirt off of the floor.

Quin programmed the Arduino code using the simple Pololu ZumoBot library, and used the Ping library to interface with the Ping sensor.  The FuzzBot also has a pan/tilt servo for the Ping sensor, and can be used with the Servo Arduino library. You can check out the parts Quin used in the picture below:

DiceBot, on the other hand, is an electronic dice that fits into an Android figurine.  It has a 7-Segment display, a 74HC595 shift register, an accelerometer, and an ATmega328p (the Arduino microcontroller).

Quin said he used his Pineapple library to drive the 7-Segment LED with the 74HC595, his Quasi-duino core for the ATmega328p without the clock, and the free Arduino IDE to program the ATmega328p.

Here are the parts Quin used when putting together Dicebot: