mBot Neo, and the end of robotics
A robot that worked, and the discovery that I did not care. The most useful dead end I have hit.
- Blockly
- mBot Neo
Blockly and an mBot Neo, at eleven. It drove, it sensed, it responded. It worked.
I am keeping this here precisely because nothing came of it. An archive that only holds the projects that continued is a highlight reel, and a highlight reel cannot show you how someone decided what to do.
The problem
The stated problem was the usual set of exercises: follow a line, avoid an obstacle, respond to a sensor. The real problem was one I did not know I was running — I was trying to find out which part of building things I actually liked, and I had no vocabulary for the question yet.
The approach
I built the exercises. Line following, obstacle avoidance, a couple of behaviours of my own that were more elaborate than they needed to be.
And I noticed, slowly, that the moment the robot moved was the least interesting moment. What held my attention was the part before: getting the logic right, watching a condition I had reasoned about turn out to be true. The motors were an output device. I would have been just as satisfied by a printed line of text — which, it turns out, is the definition of not being a roboticist.
Architecture
Block-based, so there is not much architecture to describe, and that is itself part of the record. Blockly removed syntax as an obstacle and left structure — sequence, condition, loop, state — which is the right thing to meet first.
The limitation taught me more than the capability. Blockly makes simple things trivial and complex things visually unmanageable; a behaviour with four interacting conditions becomes a wall of nested shapes you cannot read. Hitting that wall is what made text feel like a relief rather than a hurdle.
Results
A working robot and a decision. I stopped doing robotics deliberately rather than by drift, which is the only reason the year counts for anything.
Lessons learned
- A dead end you can name is worth more than a success you cannot explain. I know why I stopped. That answer has redirected everything since.
- Enjoying the outcome is not the same as enjoying the work. The robot moving was the outcome. The logic being right was the work. Those separate early, and noticing which one you are chasing saves years.
- Outgrowing a tool is data. The frustration was not a failure of Blockly. It was the signal that the problems I wanted had passed what it could express.