The Board of Education Robot (Boe-Bot) has been popular for 25 years. The origins of this robot are interesting, as it had an organic and almost accidental beginning focused on our educational customers.
The first BASIC Stamp robots appeared in the high school classroom of Chuck Schoeffler, an innovative educator in Moscow, Idaho. Chuck was making BASIC Stamp 1 robots from PVC pipe, hacked Futaba servos, and DuBro radio-controlled aircraft parts held together with hot glue and small sheet-metal screws. His success was an inspiration to Parallax to formalize what was starting to appear in education: microcontrollers, robotics, coding, and sensors. Mr. Schoeffler loved the simplicity of the PBASIC language and he bought our first Board of Education (BOE) boards for the BASIC Stamp 2. We discussed with Mr. Schoeffler how nice it would be if we could put the BOE on a robot chassis.
The Boe-Bot chassis design hatched quickly one week from a drawing made by one of our mechanical engineers, Russ Miller. Russ sketched up a sheet metal chassis and we sent a drawing to Mr. Schoeffler, who cut it out with a bandsaw, and folded it up on a vise for us. Within a week, the chassis design was formalized—and it hasn’t changed since then.
We created a simple book entitled “Robotics with the Boe-Bot” as part of our Stamps in Class series. We used a 555 timer to create the infrared frequency pulses. We put the parts in a bag and printed a few student lessons to show the potential. The next big step was actually tremendous. Andy Lindsay spent a year developing the current Robotics with the Boe-Bot book. This book is full of engineering resources, code examples, and student challenges. It quickly became the most popular robot kit ever produced. You could even buy it in RadioShack stores across the United States.
Today, you see the same metal chassis used for our Shield-Bot with Arduino, cyber:bot with micro:bit, and ActivityBot 360°. Having multiple uses of the same chassis design has allowed us to create the many robot accessories common to all of our small educational robots.
If you’re still using the Boe-Bot, we know why. The BASIC Stamp module’s simple PBASIC language, hardware ease of use, and that nothing is abstracted into libraries are among these reasons. And every BASIC Stamp always has been and always will be made in the USA!
We will be able to supply your Boe-Bot robots for many years to come!
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
