What you'll need to get a robot moving
Grab a CRICKIT board, a Circuit Playground Express or any Feather, four AA batteries or a 5V supply, and a couple of hobby DC motors or micro servos. That short list is enough to build a line-following buggy, a wobbly walking bot, or a sensor-triggered desk toy. CRICKIT (Creative Robotics and Interactive Construction Kit) is the part that turns a bare microcontroller into something that can push, spin, and light up without a breadboard full of driver chips.
What the board actually does
CRICKIT stacks onto boards a lot of students already own. There are versions for the Circuit Playground Express, for any Feather, and a HAT that bolts onto a Raspberry Pi. It talks to the host over I2C using Adafruit's seesaw co-processor, so the heavy motor switching happens on the CRICKIT itself and your main chip stays free for program logic. You can write for it in CircuitPython, MakeCode, or Arduino, which means a Grade 7 class and a college capstone team can share the exact same hardware.
The specs that decide your build
One CRICKIT drives up to 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors, 4 standard servos, and 4 capacitive-touch inputs, plus a NeoPixel output and a small onboard speaker driver for beeps and sound effects. The motor channels push about 1A each at 5V, which is fine for TT gearmotors and a small robot arm but not for a power drill. Wiring uses solderless spring terminals, so students clamp motor leads straight in with no soldering iron. In code, driving a motor is two lines: import the crickit object, then set crickit.dc_motor_1.throttle = 0.5. A bumper switch is just crickit.touch_1.value on touch pad 1.
Where to start
Flash CircuitPython onto your host board, drop the seesaw and CRICKIT libraries into the lib folder, and copy a demo script from the Adafruit Learning System at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-crickit-creative-robotic-interactive-construction-kit. Run a single servo sweep first, confirm the board answers on I2C, then add a motor. If nothing moves, check that the CRICKIT has its own battery pack connected, because it will not turn motors off USB power alone.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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