Live Robot Hack Session
DJ Sures
Synthiam

1983 Robot Magazines show robots haven't changed

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Take a trip with us into the past down memory lane - or - aka the time before now! We spend 3 and a half hours browsing 3 robot magazines from 1983 that show the robot industry hasn't changed. Today, the industry is making the same robots with the same challenges. Amazing to see how far we've come and how far we haven't!

Did you know there were 32x32 pixel vision systems for Commodore 64 and BBC Microcomputers?


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#41  

Wow Tony, Thanks.

Your correct about DJ. I fully agree and always have.

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Synthiam
#42  

Thanks a bunch Tony and Dave - I enjoy watching what you do with your robots and that's thanks enough! I just realized the avatars have santa hats on them - haha web dev is hilarious

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#43  

Back in the early eighties (1981), I built my first computerised robot - it was full scale and its "brain" was a hacked Sinclair ZX81 computer which was connected to the robot via a radio link - I managed to give it very primitive speech recognition using a zero crossing algorithm so it would respond to 20 commands. It had 8K battery backed RAM and a Votrax SC01 speech synthesiser - note the early ultrasonic ranger on the robot and the microphone.

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Synthiam
#44  

That's so cool. I remember you posting about that before. There were a number of those type of robots that were for sale.  Surprised yours wasn't turned into a product as well. Not sure how many of those robots were sold back then - but it is a shame we don't see those home robots of that size today. If styled right, with a built in vacuum and wet/dry floor clean - it would be pretty cool.

Long as it had a tray to move things around between rooms, it would be pretty useful!

#45  

Wow did not know a BigTrak had a near reboot in 2012, I would have bought 1 of those instead of the hugely way too expensive Robosapien V2!