So I was able to get my hands on a tessel board and it has been a lot of fun! I’ve been toying with simple servo controls all the way to the Bluetooth Low Energy module (learning that from scratch was interesting!).

Using the servos I made a little arm to pick things up…but since it is made out of balsa wood, it is pretty flimsy.

I was able to get my hands on a stepper motor and get that working with the tessel so ideally I’ll keep going the same route to have the “arm” move up and down a track knowing it’s position as it goes.  Maybe even have the arm be able to do a full 360 twist as well to be able to work on both sides of the track.  Check out a video of what I have so far here.

The cool thing about the tessel is it’s native language is javascript so most developers coming from a web background can easily get to tinkering with hardware/electronics with it!

Will be exciting to see what others pull off with this thing!