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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: SIMPLE ROBOTS
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 1994 13:18:20 GMT
Message-ID: <Cz7JMp.KAI@armory.com>
References: <9409020053.018XQ02@circellar.com> <39dhl0$dkf@newsbf01.news.aol.com> <Cyu6o8.J62@armory.com> <LARRY.78.00197CEB@crete.hsc.colorado.edu>
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In article <LARRY.78.00197CEB@crete.hsc.colorado.edu>,
Larry MacNeill <LARRY@crete.hsc.colorado.edu> wrote:
>In article <Cyu6o8.J62@armory.com> rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz) writes:
>
>>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
>
>Seems to me that there is quite a bit of indispensable experience behind these
>words.  I would like to know enough to be able to scrounge a pile of junk to 
>make something cool but it'll be a while.  I just bought a book, _Robot 
>Builder's Bonanza --- 99 Inexpensive Robotics Projects_, toward that end.
>What got me going on this was the desire to make a Logo turtle for my 5-year 
>old's kindergarten class.  Does anyone have any suggestions of what to pursue 
>and what to avoid?
>Larry MacNeill               larry@crete.hsc.colorado.edu
>University of Colorado       Denver, CO
------------------------------------------------------
1) Avoid the fear of breaking things so you can just DO IT!!!! The fear of
doing something wrong is what keeps people from learning to do it RIGHT!!!
There's always more junk. If youwill never find another part like that
whatchacallit, what in the hell are you designing with it for??? What if
you wanted to make ANOTHER ONE!!! In other words, stop being paralyzed by
fear. It'll stunt your technical growth. Labor is more expensive than parts
anyway!

2) Pursue finding out things. Use what sense you have, but don't be afraid
to fail. It just means that now you know one more thing that won't work.
There really are not so many of those that you won't find some that DO!!!
Don't be afraid to make a fool out of yourself. If you can't stand not
having stuff work in front of others, then work with the door locked and
tell no one what you're doing! But then you can't ask questions, can you???
Sounds limiting. Sounds like something to get rid of, doesn't it. Make a
fool of yourself. Only those who waste thir time with such judgements will
suffer!

Basically, you will have to learn the things I learned when I was quite
small. I was too young to be humiliated back then, just disappointed, so I
learned more rapidly to cut and fit and try and cut and fit and try and cut
and fit and try and cut..... etc. You get the idea. "Failure", as many
adults fail to understand it, is what you do in the process of
succeeding!!! Nothing more!!! Enjoy yourself. That's what it's for. Nothing
else!!!

Example: Most labor-saving devices aren't really labor-saving, and aren't
really much better than doing it by hand. But they are simply elegant and
cute! The massive amount of work people do to wash clothes, for example, is
way more than the time it used to actually take down at the river!! Now we
have to work to pay the power bill. We have to work to buy and maintain the
washer and dryer. We have to work to load them into and out of these
things, and actually, as I found one year, if you toss your clothes in the
bathtub every night and fill it with soapy water, and then later the next
day wash them a little by hand or with a T-shaped wooden handle, and then
later drain that and fill it with clear water, and do the same again, and
then hang them on a line, they get even cleaner, and they smell better!
That sounds like a lot of work. It isn't. Humans make stuff for fun. We
haven't really gotten machines to do everything for us yet when you count
the overhead.

But we won't EVER get there unless making machines is seen as fun!!! We
need almost everybody to learn how to hook up and program simple
controllers and actuators! Whether they use them for art or for toys or for
doing chores, they are simply the most fun humans can have short of eating
and sex, (the order varies according to what you did most recently). This
is the thing we do. We should all learn to do it as well as the three R's!
Doing it is fooling around. That's fun! Make what you do FUN!!! It's what
you were born to get a kick out of!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

