I have used arduino.... although really good... EZB4 will blow arduino out of the water with it's built in features...

Very nice Droid @Slee The Sloth . I really, really like it. Very nice craftsmanship.

I think you'll find EZ Robot is what your looking for. I'm automating a full size B9 and am amazed what it's doing to make my robot come alive.

d.cochran's completely correct in all he states. If your worried about being tethered to a computer you can run the droid from a smart phone or even put a Mini ATX motherboard and SSD hard drive somewhere on him. Or just keep everything on a small laptop and sit it on a table somewhere around the house. If you take the little guy out you can hook directly to the laptop without the need of a router and Wifi network!

I hope you stick around. I'd love to see what your R2 can do with EZB.

I had the same concerns when I first started looking at the ez-b. I then realized the following and decided it was the way to go for me.

when technology changes, I can continue to use the same controllers and upgrade my laptop, which I would do anyway.

my Bot would be connected to my WiFi anyway.

the Bot would now have access to my network or anything on the internet

the processing can happen much better on my i7 without dedicating it to just my robot.

the cost of getting into this becomes much lower because I wasn't having to buy a board capable of all of this processing.

my robot could now do more than I had ever imagined.

I decided it was right for me. Then I downloaded ARC and saw how easy it was to make the Bot do almost anything. I was sold.

Not a correction but some clarification of @d.cochran's statement about two being connected to the PC at one time, you can actually connect five, giving 40 ADC ports, 120 digital ports, 15 I2C ports (although you can connect multiple devices on each port) etc. etc.

The project must be built in ARC on a Windows 7 or higher PC but once saved to the cloud you can run it from an android/iOS device if required.

The combination of EZ-B and PC processing really blows all other controllers away. Very simple to modify a project or even build and test one on the fly.

And, above all else, awesome support from EZ-Robots and this community.

Richard, I agree this dose blow Arduino's out of the water and then some.

Dave, Thanks for the complements. I will decently be sticking around. I can see so many possibilities. I have been thinking of building a protocol droid like C3PO to greet people when they come into my computer shop. It would not have to do much but wave and turn its head. The voice commands could be used to have it carry on a conversation with customers until I can get with them. That would be slightly impressing. Yup I'm going to hang out here often. I'd be interested in seeing Your B-9 if you have any videos.

Thanks for all your help.

Your C3Po Droid would rock with the text to speech and speech recognition built into ARC....

Richard R , Thanks yes I think it would be impressive.

Ok so I thought of yet another question. The speaker, can it be external or plugged into an small amp ?

also wondering a bought the microphone, can it be external ?

There are ports on the bottom of the ez-b for external speakers. There is a separate location that you would want to solder to if you are going to use an amp. There is an extensive post on this in this forum.

microphone is a bit different. I am trying to figure out what to do there also. Thinking about a Bluetooth mic to the PC. If you are going with a phone, there would be options there, but I haven't researched that yet.