Another question...

[Gordo4444]

I'd like to somewhat apologize for all these questions... I've always been interested in robotics and I've never had someone to teach me how to program and what not. So as you can tell, I'm very excited about this!

Ok, back to the question... Actually 2 questions... My family and I went to the store HobbyTown USA the other day and I bought, what they called, a binary reading robot. What it did, was it had a little scanner on it and you colored in lines on a template that they gave you and it read the lines and moved how the lines said. IE. 2 lines means straight, 1 line means turn left, 3 means right, 4 means 180... etc... My question is what kind of sensor is it? And can I take it off and put it to good use? Second question is this. With all electronic toys and stuff, there are no slots to plug a programmer into? How do they get the program onto the toy without a slot?

[airman00]

We are here to help!

You mean this robot http://www.amazon.com/Ramsey-Electronics-OWI9875-Binary-Player/dp/B000GHWSYI
It uses Infrared sensors to detect how much light is reflected off the disc - black reflects less light than white - then it can tell where the line is

OK in robots there is something called a microcontroller chip

It runs the program , its basically a mini computer. Now that chip gets programmed. Robot builders who plan on changing the program of the robot many times , add on the "slot" or wire connection to the robot for easy programming. The other way to do this is to take out the chip itself and put the chip itself in a new circuit which programs it via the computer's USB or serial port.

In that robot you could probably use the chassis and  use the IR sensors for line detection or obstacle avoidance. Though the circuit in the robot is pretty much useless to you( except the transistors in there that control the motors)

look on the main site http://www.societyofrobots.com/ on the left side for different links to tutorials

If you have any other questions after searching google and reading the tutorials , feel free to ask any other question.

[HDL_CinC_Dragon]

Basically, they program the MCU(Micro Controller Unit) in a separate circuit and then transfer the MCU to that board and its good to go.