A few months ago we ran an advertisement for the Buggy in Silicon Chip, the Australian electronics magazine. The editors were intrigued by the ad, and asked us to send them a Buggy for a review. Here’s the result.
The two page review from the May issue of Silicon Chip introduces readers to MikroElektronika as a company, before describing how the Buggy works. Everything is covered, the assembly, the clicker 2 boards, the Android control, the mikroBootloader. They also explained what click boards are all about.
Read the whole piece and you’ll get a solid idea of what the Buggy is and what are its potentials. All in all, the little four-wheeler made a positive impression on the writers:
The MikroElektronika Buggy is very much the starting point. Just how far you take it depends on … just how far you want to take it. With the almost continuous release of click boards covering an incredible range of applications, even if you don’t have programming skills (yet – you soon will with the Buggy!) you’re going to have an enormous amount of fun while you learn. Highly recommended!
The part about the Buggy being a starting point hits the nail on the head. See, when we first released the Buggy, to make sure that nobody missed the Android app, we pretty much promoted it as a rc vehicle with a potential to add sensing capabilities. Our kits also include a Bluetooth click.
But don’t let that mislead you into narrowing your view. The Buggy is equally well suited as a development platform for developing autonomus cars. More so than a lot of robotic rover platforms you’ll see elsewhere. The Buggy really is a car, it has exactly four wheels, it has front lights, back lights, signal lights. The five slots for click boards (if a clicker 2 is mounted), plus mounting holes for all sorts of antennas can be used for modelling driverless car systems in a safe way.
For those that don’t know about it, Silicon Chip was started in 1987 and today remains the only Australian electronics magazine that caters to the hobbyist (according to wikipedia that is — if we’re wrong please let us know). It features instructions for various projects, circuit notebooks, as well as product showcases.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika