Newsgroups: comp.robotics
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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Robot Disk Handler
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 1994 08:36:05 GMT
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In article <39eugl$fbr@earth.pylon.com>, Dan Mauch <danmauch@pylon.com> wrote:
>I have had a need to copy the contents of one disk onto 100's of other 
>disks. What a royal pain! I got an idea of how to make a cimple numerical 
>controlled (CCNC) robot that will open the 360K drive bay door, take a 
>disk and insert it into the floppy drive, when the disk is copied, it 
>will unlock the door, the disk will be extraxted and dropped into a 
>hopper of copied disks while the next disk in the stack with be placed in 
>the que. 
> Is there a machine that does this? If so how much. Is there a need to 
>have such a machine for other programmers/ roboteers etc. I could build 
>one for myself for under $100. But if there was a market for them the 
>cost would probably be close to $300.
>If there is no interest I can add it to my growing list of other CCNC 
>machines :)
------------------------------------------
Yup, Dan, all the software houses have them or lease them or farm out the
duplication job to someone with them. They're called "Verifier"'s or
Copier/Verifiers, and I've seen the inside. Basically, they just slide
disks off a stack and slide them down to the drive section, which is
stripped down, and the works elsewhere, and then they are clamped with the
hub on an arm, and then the hub comes back up and the copied disk is
removed and sent to a bin stack where they get a tyvek and go off to
packaging. They can have rows and rows of these at larger software houses.
Lately, however, this job is being done by the software retailer, and the
latest versions are modemed in in the night and there is a serial number
and CRC or checksum program assigned with a password for that outlet to
make serialized copies while you wait. A lot of the big packages have only
the manuals in them anymore. It's THOSE you break the shrink-wrap on!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

