Rex is a development platform targeted at sophisticated robotic applications. Mike Lewis and Kartik Tiwarti are the team behind Rex, they founded Alphalem in March last year to market their designs. Lewis explained “It’s designed specifically for robots, with a price higher than the RaspberryPi, but the experience of building a robot is less of a pain – no wiring hassles, it has built-in battery inputs, and boots up directly into a robot programming environment.”

 

After building many robots themselves they felt sure that there was a market for designers who already had Arduino-based robot designs under their belt and were looking for a more advanced platform. At the system’s core is the Alphalem Development Environment (ADE) which consists of scripts, sample programs written in C++, an API for communicating with devices connected to Rex using I2C expansion ports, and a process management system for running multiple robot control programs (Tasks) in parallel. Alphalem OS also includes built-in drivers for sensors and actuators that the Alphalem's team selected as the most useful for robot designs.

 

They launched their Kickstarter campaign earlier this month and are looking for $90,000 in pledges. The basic model starts at $99 for which you get a fully featured board (including DSP, camera and microphone inputs, with the OS preloaded).