Asked
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I found a photo of my first (programmable) robot build back in 1979 which worked by recording tones on a cassette player! I have no idea why I did not have a shirt on, I think it was a hot Summer that year!
Steve S and Rex (and of course DJ) have produced some awesome robots in the past years so I thought it would be neat to start a thread on forum members first robots so we can see where everyone started from, so here is mine.
Tony
Robot-Doc, I always thought the HERO Robot was such an advanced robot when it came out. Very interesting. That must have been an been a very enjoying build. Steve S
My first robot was made of a Quaker oats can and Popsicle sticks back in the sixties. Sadly, my mom threw him out the next week. She just didn't have the vision...
@Toymaker
Thank you so much! I'm sure I'll be alright since I'm using the Bosches just for the pivot points on the arm, so it's not gonna need a "vertical" load. Here's a photo of where I'm gonna put them.
But really, that's crazy generous, "free"? I'm sure I can return the favor somehow. If this works, are these widely available? I may want to market some of my arm designs to more "adventurous" builders, who wants to look more than the generic simpleton designs most companies offer...
@Steve ...James! Commodore 64 WOW you bring back memories ...Thanks for sharing that! @Robot Doc yeah the Heath kit Hero was very cool and "top of the line" cool.... @Doombot well thought out arm and engineered.
Steve S Ya the Hero Jr was a lot of fun and also a funny robot with its autonomous movement and weird comments. Some speech could even be programmed from the front panel.
irobot58 Hero Jr took a lot of my time and i had to give it away to some kids that showed interest in robots due to my moving from Birmingham, AL to Chicago, IL to help build the first computer stored program call processing system at Bell Labs.
Steve S, great to see your Commodore 64 robot again it was a very neat robot! In my first robot, the 16 PLL tone decoders and associated TTL logic chips etc drew nearly 2 amps for the robots control circuitry alone, this shows how far we have come these days!
@Doombot, I think they will work well for you, but you may need to couple 2 together at the elbow joint if it is to pick up heavy loads.
@Robot-Doc, I always wanted a Hero robot, it had the Votrax SC01 phoneme (single chip) speech synthesizer by a company called Federal Screw. In 1981 I wanted my robots to talk, and sent off (to the States) for an SC01, the chip (from memory) was about £30 delivered, in those days £30 was a weeks wages for some people! It was a great little chip and easy to use with an 8 bit bus (6 lowest bits for phoneme selection and the upper 2 bits for infliction) and strobe/ack pins. It sounded very robot like, I think the SC01 was used in the film "War games" as the computers voice.
Robot-Doc, I found numerous videos of the Hero Jr. ( A very advanced robot in 1984!, and somewhat today, 30 years later!.) Sharing robotics and teaching with young students is what I want. I also thought the voice sounded like "WAR GAMES" . Maybe AIMEC EZ Robot will continue? Now we can build our own with EZ Robot.
Steve S
I thought I saw DJ in that classroom!
Thanks for digging that out @Steve!