Newsgroups: comp.robotics
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From: kilian@cray.com (Alan Kilian)
Subject: Whiskers the robot and its design
Message-ID: <1993Jan28.125117.24125@hemlock.cray.com>
Lines: 41
Nntp-Posting-Host: gopher
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 28 Jan 93 12:51:16 CST

Don Golding is selling a robot called "Whiskers". It sounds quite cute to me. 

If I had had $400.00 when I was is highschool I probably would have gotten
one of these.

Not everyone can build a robot. Not everyone can do the mechanical design
necessary to get a robot moving reliably. I still find this the hardest
part of robotics and I have built several machines in the last 15 years.

Please give us some more information about the design of Whiskers.

1) What motor controllers do you use?
2) How do you do microphone input? What micropone/amp design?
3) What is the design of the optical collision detector? I still have
   problems with mine. They don't work until an object is about 2 inchec away
   and then it is sometimes too late.

Now a plea: Please Please Please stop acting superior about your product.
It does you more damage than good. This is a really nice group (Generally)
and if you don't misbehave you'll get along fine. The only posts I see from
you are advertisements. You must have tons of information that this group
can use if you have designed a robot and are marketing it. Please start
sharing it any you will get more orders than you can handle. I'm sure that
Dave Dunfield got a few dozen orders for his "C" development system just from
the Miniboard talk and no one complained about that did they? That's because
1) Dave didn't advertise his products here, he got other satisfied customers
   to do it for him.
2) No one was answering requests for another development system by saying
   "Dave Dunfield has a better one so buy it instead of that trash"

I will repeat my plea: Please start posting information about Whiskers'
design. If you can post schematics and parts lists. If you think that this
is proprietary information and aren't willing to share it then just quit
posting altogether.

                  -Alan Kilian

-- 
 -Alan Kilian           kilian@cray.com 612.683.5499 (Work) 612.721.3990 (Home)
 "It is a little hard to tell the difference between a machine that doesn't
  work and a machine that doesn't exist." -Martin Walker quoting someone else
