About mirobo
The advent of small, inexpensive microcontrollers has profoundly changed the electronics industry as well as electronics and computer technology education. The mirobo circuits and this website are the result of my desire to share my robots – my robos – with others, to help them teach or learn about microcontroller circuits.
mirobo is dedicated to sharing circuits, instructional activities, and best practices for teaching basic electronic and fundamental computer technology concepts with other teachers, hobbyists, and especially new learners. I hope some of my circuits and resources will help inspire you on your computer technology journey!
John Rampelt
Chief Human, mirobo
John has over 30 years of teaching experience in electronics, computer technology, and automation, and enjoys the outdoors when not coercing electrons into doing things for him.
Simple projects…
…big impact!
The phrase simple projects, big impact is an encapsulation of our educational philosophy.
Our name and logo
The mirobo name, from ‘my robot’ alludes to the possibility of creating your own electronic circuits and robots. The rounded letter forms, especially of the word robo, evoke an image of a wheeled robot.
The vertical lines and circular dot symbolize the characteristics of both digital and analogue signals through their spaced segments and the sinusoidal or wave-y upper envelope, respectively. At the same time, the rounded shapes both spell the mi part of the mirobo name as well as represent the shape of the fingers on a hand – in which case the circle can double as the engineering iron ring – reinforcing our goals of providing hands-on learning opportunities through our products.
Our commitment to you
We are committed to sharing to help you improve your knowledge and skills in using microcontrollers.
All of the lesson materials and resources shared on this website are freely available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Permission is hereby freely granted for anyone to share, adapt, copy, and redistribute any or all parts of our lesson materials and resources, in any format, as long as credit is provided to mirobo.tech. All of the work on this website is provided ‘as-is’, for educational purposes only. No warranty is provided or implied relating to the accuracy of this work or its suitability for any purpose, but we hope you will find it useful.
We also release some materials in the form of freely re-mixable Google documents, which are hosted on Google websites but linked from this site, and for which all of the same terms apply.
Some of our circuits (but not all) are released as open hardware, giving you the freedom to change them to suit your needs or create new products or projects based on them. If you find our circuits useful, please let us know – we’d love to see how you’re using them in your applications.
Our commitment to education
Our free and open hardware circuit designs allow educators and schools to benefit from using their own manufacturing partners to provide circuit boards to them at a lower cost, either through quantity production, or donations.
Teachers, schools, or education-focused maker-spaces unable to produce their own circuit boards or looking to purchase non-open hardware circuits are encouraged to contact us for information on education and/or quantity discounts, as well as to enquire about custom kits or builds (for example, UBMP4 circuit boards with the USB-C connector pre-soldered). We would be happy to work with you to make your job easier.
Please contact us with any questions relating to our products or learning materials.