Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!pipex!uunet!hobbes!earth.armory.com!rstevew
From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: SIMPLE ROBOTS
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 1994 08:09:43 GMT
Message-ID: <Cyu6o8.J62@armory.com>
References: <9409020053.018XQ02@circellar.com> <39dhl0$dkf@newsbf01.news.aol.com>
Sender: news@armory.com (Usenet News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: deepthought.armory.com
Lines: 41

In article <39dhl0$dkf@newsbf01.news.aol.com>,
Rich2soar <rich2soar@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <9409020053.018XQ02@circellar.com>,
>stephen.griswold@circellar.com writes:
>
>DOES ANYONE HAVE INFORMATION ON BUILDING SMALL ROBOTS. SIMPLE, CHEAP, THAT
>I
>COULD BUILD WITH THE KIDS TO INTRODUCE THE SUBJECT TO THEM? I'VE SEEN SOME
>KITS IN THE SCIENCE/HOBBY STORE BUT THE COST IS A BIT HIGH FOR STARTING?
>ANY
>INFO WOULD BE HELPFULL. THANKS
>
>------> I know LEGO makes a robotics kit that will interface with your pc.
>It has it's own little language.  And with kids....Lego's are an essential
>building block...It may be expensive.($600) however, the ability to be
>used with other lego products I feel its one of your best choices......
>Rich2Soar@aol.com
-----------------------------------------------------
Actually, starting with broken toys and broken radios and other electronic
junk works fine and costs doodley-squat! I built a robot arm for a local
kid out of the steppers in one old throw-away printer and a bunch of
bobbins for the inter-braided nylon cord you can buy in big rolls. The cord
acts as the cable drive as it does in a printer. The components were scrap
wood and bolts for hinges and it ran off his Atari 800, purchased for $6 at
the Thrift Store in Santa Cruz, WITH BASIC cartridge! (All important!) You
do I/O out of its joystick ports, they can be direction set in a register,
and the TTL out runs some small transistors to some larger transistors,
none of them matched, and the controllers for the motors weren't even
matched H-bridges!! Just about any big power transistor will do!! We used
two bridges of four out of two car steroes! They were free! If you want to
build it cheap, build it from junk! (It's not REALLY junk, it's a
constantly disappearing National resource! But the idiots don't know that
yet!!!) Who needs an Armitron from the Radial Smack? It heaves and strips
its gears worse than a nicely counter-balanced arm of 2x2's does! Ours can
pick up and gently set a glass of water down! And it has pots into the
bottom row of the joyports to tell it where the arm is at all times!
Stripped them out of those paddle things we got broken for nothing! With
computer, total cost about $10. Screw Lego and Fischer-Techniks and so on.
They're just next decade's Barbi dolls for budding yuppie kids.
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

