SMRRF 2026 Kit

Thank you for picking up a RoboPad kit at SMRRF 2026! On this page you'll find all the information you'll need to get setup like we were at the event.

The kit itself is build around the RoboPad, assembled onto a breakout board that we call the EduBoard. In order to find out more about the RoboPad, checkout the user guide and the rest of this wiki. The RoboPad can be configured to do quite a few things, but by default it is configured to just drive two brushed motors using a simple tank-drive control scheme - this should be enough to get you started, before you begin taking steps to make more complex bots!

Before you start, we recommend that you register your product; in doing so, you'll be able to choose to sign up for firmware updates and general product updates, should you want to. These are the best ways of keeping up to date with information on the latest RoboPad firmware releases and feature updates.

Kit Contents and Quickstart

The components in the kit

The kit itself only accounts for the electronic components - everything you need to build a simple 2-wheel robot. However, if you took home parts on the day, you may have additional 3D printed parts.

The kit is designed to make it easy to use a 9v battery and a RoboPad to drive two motors. The power switch (3) is separated from the power distribution wire (5) so that you can easily mount the power switch into any 3D printed enclosure (such as the 3D printed print-a-blok switch holder that was used at SMRRF) without having to resolder its connecting wires.

The RoboPad+EduBoard combo allows for easy connection of servo motors and additional outputs should you want to add more later down the line.

To get going with your RoboPad, simply connect the two motors to the "M1" and "M2" headers on the EduBoard breakout (optionally via the extension leads for extra reach), connect a 9v battery to the connector, the switch to the battery connector, and then the battery connector into the JST-XH connector on the EduBoard, and then flick the switch to turn it on. You should see a network with the same name as the one listed on the RoboPad. Connect to it, and navigate to "start.robopad.co.uk" (or "192.168.4.1" if your phone raises an SSL warning) in your phone's browser and start driving.

Printable Parts

The SMRRF 2026 workshop was run in collaboration with The 3D Printing Professor, facilitated by DreamsVoid. Through this collaboration, we were able to leverage the creativity of the 3D-printable building block system, PrintABlok, as a base for the robots you built! We designed a number of our own PrintABlok parts to support the electrical components available, and DreamsVoid provided kilograms of base parts. If you'd like to 3D print these parts yourself, you can find them below:

• The Blayze Tech RoboPad PrintABlok support parts on Printables
• The Blayze Tech N20 motor/o-ring wheels on Printables
• The 3D Printing Professor's online store, where you can get the base PrintABlok parts and the electroBlok parts for free, as well as many other themed PrintABlok sets at a reasonable price point (we personally are quite excited about his recently released PrintAQuest line)
• DreamsVoid's connector removal tool - an incredibly useful tool for when you want to remove PrintABlok connectors

The RoboPad & EduBoard

The pin mappings of a RoboPad mounted onto an EduBoard.

The EduBoard is a carrier board for a RoboPad. It provides a secure battery attachment interface via a JST-XH connector and easily accessible headers to attach motors and additional actuators to.

Just like the RoboPad, the board accepts an input power of between 4 and 10v. The polarity of this input power source matches that indicated on the attached RoboPad - that is, positive on the left, with negative (ground) on the right. If you bought your kit on the day, you may notice that the leads on the supplied JST-XH connection cable do not match this colourscheme; however if you received your kit in the post, you will find that they do. In both cases, the correct way to place the JST-XH cable into the power socket is to align it correctly with the socket itself, rather than considering the wiring colours.

On the base RoboPad, additional actuators can be attached to a number of the exposed pins. However, pins E1 and E2 are considered the "default" external pins, as the other pins can exhibit undefined behaviour briefly on device power-up (these pins are defined as "advanced" or "extra" pins). The EduBoard breaks out these two pins, as well as the most stable of extra pins in a format that makes them easily usable alongside typical hobby-grade servos via the 3-pin connectors on the left of the board. As indicated on the board, the left-most pin is a ground pin, the middle is the power input to the servo, and the right is the signal.

Functionally, the signal pin is directly connected to it's respective pin on the base RoboPad board, and provides a 3.3v signal to the connected device. The power pin, however, is selectable via two solderable joints on the rear of the EduBoard. Using one or more of these joints, it is possible to select the maximum voltage that will be provided to the given servos. This can be particularly useful when you are trying to drive a servo that operates at a lower voltage than the input voltage provided to the board itself. For example, when powering a hobby 9v servo that operates at 6v, but with a 9v battery connected, you will want to solder the "5.8v" selector - this will step down the battery's voltage to around 6v, allowing it to safely drive the servo without risk of overvolting it. The combined current draw of these pins is limited to 2.1 amps, so please check the maximum current draw of the actuators you intend to connect before attempting to drive them.

Additionally, servos need not be the only things driven. By ignoring the central "PWR" connector, the Externals headers become generic output pins - you could, for example, connect an LED via from a "SIG" pin to it's respective "GND" pin via a current limiting resistor - then, by configuring the output as a digital or PWM output in the IO Config Editor, you can dynamically control that LED from the UI.

Tips

Prints

Unlike the base PrintABlok parts which use zip-ties, the bloks that we designed for the SMRRF workshop use compliant clips to hold the components in. These can result in it being a little different to get components in and out:

• Motors should be firmly pushed in with a little more pressure on the rear of the motor first, to ensure proper alignment of the solder joints within the block, followed by force on the front - they will reach a "halfway point" where you will then be able to apply equal pressure to the whole motor.
• Motors can be removed by hand, but this can hurt. Instead, consider printing the Motor remover part from the Printables object, which requires 4 M2 nuts and 2 M2 cylindrical head bolts - the bolts are placed in such a way that they extend into the cavity in the print, and then motor blocks can be slid onto the bolts, with the bolts sliding through the connector holes and pushing the motors out of the blok.
• A flathead screwdriver is useful to remove the EduBoard form it's blok.
• In order to remove 9v batteries from our holder, grip it by the base and top of the battery+connector combo.

If you are struggling to remove wheels from the motor shaft, consider using needle-nose grippers as a lever between the wheel and the motor.

The 3D Printing Professor has a number of electrical-oriented bloks that you may find useful in his ElectroBloks kit - in particular, we found that the humble "wire tidy" block was incredibly useful for cable management on our test robots. He's also got some motor mounts for bigger so-called "yellow" motors, and LEDs.

Robot Control and Handling

Before changing the nodegraph editor, it can be easier to fix drive control and orientation issues by simply moving or flipping the connectors connected to M1 and M2. In the default configuration, swap the two connectors to swap which slider controls which wheel, and simply unplug, rotate by 180 degrees, and re-plug a connector in to invert the direction the motor drives. Before learning to race around a home-built course, take some time to configure these things first.

If you are finding your robot to be difficult to control due to its speed, before editing the nodegraph, consider going to the IO Configuration Editor and turning down the forward and reverse scales on the two default built-in H-bridge motor IO Units that are linked to the M1 and M2 ports on the EduBoard first.

By default, RoboPads are configured with tank-drive (two sliders, with each controlling a single motor). While this gives a very intuitive understanding of how the robot works, and makes for easy debugging, it is not a very intuitive control scheme. Consider opening the nodegraph editor and trying to configure a joystick control, or for more fine-grained control, plug in a USB controller and configure a Gamepad Node to work with it.

Battery Selection

The kits that we sold on the day only provided 9v battery connectors, as unfortunately selling and posting batteries is not something that we can currently offer. However, should you wish to source and upgrade your battery yourself, here are some tips.

The RoboPad accepts anywhere from 4v to 10v as input, meaning that 9v, 4/6x AAs, 2S lithium polymer or 2S lithium ion batteries can be used. During the event, we used 2S lithium ion batteries, as they lasted long and posed a lower puncture risk than lithium polymer batteries. Specifically, we used toy RC car batteries that allowed us to swap out the batteries for replacement - these were good, however in our post-event testing we did notice that they lack the required power output to reliably support rapid movements from standing to full-speed. However, if driving the bot under normal circumstances, this kind of movement rarely occurs (we were only able to replicate it with our automated QA system).

In combat robotics, as the RoboPad is built for, we typically use 2s lithium polymer batteries for their smaller sizes. However, they can quickly run too low to be succesfully recharged, so are better suited to short stints of usage. They also pose a fairly significant puncture/fire risk. Please use care when using or handling any battery and if in doubt, seek experienced help.

The RoboPad does not currently implement a battery protection low-voltage cut-off, however in the near future we aim to implement a battery level sensor as part of the available IO units (this will be released as a firmware update).