Ah, I think in 2001 Hal got paranoid and tried to kill everyone then lost it's mind. sick Hope we're not heading in this direction. Please install an off button.

The three laws of robotics would take over, we are safe

Ya know , I'm not really all that worried about the three laws of robotics , more like suggestions.... Like a speed limit

@Toymaker

I have also had Denise for quite some time. She works GREAT for me. She did not work for Thomas, I don't know why.

I am a subscriber to Robot Magazine, but you can still send me the article if you wish. I would like that. I am also looking hard at your new robot to be released. But, my wife says "No More Robots!" So, I don't know how it will end up. But, please tell me more.

Thanks,

Mel

:)

Toymaker could you please send that article to me also? email [email protected] Thanks Chris

There is a reason I now put an OFF switch on the front of every big robot that I develop, this is because the first large programmable robot that I made (Herbie) in 1979 malfunctioned and went nuts causing some damage to my home at that time. This was before I started to use microprocessors and microcontrollers, so the only way I could figure out to make a programmable robot was with tone decoding and storing the tones on a stereo cassette. At this time there was a neat chip available the NE567 phase locked loop which could be set with a very narrow center frequency, in Herbie there was a bank of them set to different center frequencies (tones), One tone would make the robot move forward, another left etc. The robot was programmed with a stereo cassette recorder connected to the RF transmitter that I built for the job. Pressing the required buttons the transmitter would send out the tone for the movement or arm control, and the duration of the tone was the amount of movement that the robot did. At the same time as these tones are being generated they are also being recorded on the cassette tape, so once the robot had been taught to do something, I just had to place him back in his charging pod then rewind the tape and insert it in the tape player in its body a press play and it then would follow the same tone instructions that it had been taught. But I made a BIG mistake with the design, and thought I would be clever and use the RF link to turn the robot on/off (sleep mode), while this worked ok for some time the large DC motors that the robot used for locomotion where very (RF) noisy and I had to use a "delta" configuration of suppression capacitors on each motor to reduce the wideband RF noise that the motors emitted. The problem occurred when one of the sets of suppression capacitors failed and basically when the motor was running it filled the local area with wideband RF noise which the robots receiver also picked up and saw the noise as tones which effectively made the robot go completely berserk! Herbie was 5foot tall built in aliminium and was very heavy (using car batteries), so this robot careering around out of control did damage to wallpaper, a coffee table and even dented the thin skinned door to the room it was in. I was in panic chasing it around to get the back undone and pull the main drive fuse.

There are more details of Herbie on Cyberneticzoo http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=2280

Mel and Chris, I have emailed you the Robot magazine article on our robots and Ai development.

Thanks Toymaker. So from what I am reading is... you are going to be making possibly some kind of add on module to add to the EZB controller? Awesome thanks again for the article. Chris

I will probably be asking more questions because I just bought another EZB.

:)