Vintage Robot

[Toymaker]

This is the first robot that I built, it must have been around the late seventies. Servo magazine, did a piece on this a few years back.

It was programmed using tones (decoded by PLL chips) playback by cassette player. Note the early ultasonic ranger!

Anyone else here working on robots this far back?




Tony

[householdutensils]

That's awesome!!! Do you have any more detailed information for those of us who don't have access to Servo Magazine?

[Toymaker]

That's awesome!!! Do you have any more detailed information for those of us who don't have access to Servo Magazine?

This full sized robot was heavy and ran off a heavy duty car battery. It was before microcontrollers and I wanted to program it to do simple stuff, so I built a car stereo player into the front of the machine. I then built a 16 channel RC system based on sending audio tones that a bank of NE567 PLL chips decoded. The system was first started from a know point "Robot cubby hole" then sending the tone commands (via radio) over to the robot (tone1 = forward, tone5 = left arm up etc). At the same time, these tones (and the duration of the tone) was recorded on one channel of the stereo cassette, I used the other channel to record speech at certain parts of the playback. So when programming the robot, you first took it through the sequence that you wanted it to do later, then when finished, put the robot back at the start position, rewind the cassette and insert it into the robot who would now follow all the original tone commands.

Tony

[airman00]

It was programmed using tones (decoded by PLL chips) playback by cassette player.

funny how I use that same type of system even today.

[Admin]

This is the first robot that I built, it must have been around the late seventies. Servo magazine, did a piece on this a few years back.

It was programmed using tones (decoded by PLL chips) playback by cassette player. Note the early ultasonic ranger!

Anyone else here working on robots this far back?

Considering you've been making robots since before my parents even met each other, got any links to your latest robot? (sorry if that sounded insulting, I just assumed you're making some pretty awesome things after all these years!)

As for programming with cassette players, I hated them with a passion! I used to program computers with them when I was like 7 or 8 years old . . . the loading time was like 5 to 10 minutes . . . some moron engineer decided you had to hold the transfer button during that entire transfer. Move that finger just once, and you had to start over

I wasn't smart enough to figure all that out on my own though, my father taught me all that . . . strangely his technological mind digressed, and I find myself showing him how to use google and check email these days . . .

[Toymaker]

This is the first robot that I built, it must have been around the late seventies. Servo magazine, did a piece on this a few years back.

It was programmed using tones (decoded by PLL chips) playback by cassette player. Note the early ultasonic ranger!

Anyone else here working on robots this far back?

Considering you've been making robots since before my parents even met each other, got any links to your latest robot? (sorry if that sounded insulting, I just assumed you're making some pretty awesome things after all these years!)

Hi Admin

My latest robot is AIMEC:3 this is shown in another thread, and it's the most advanced machine I have made so far!

I remember those computer cassette program loaders, on the old Sinclair ZX80 you sometimes had to wait for twenty minutes, only to find it had not loaded correctly!

Cheers

Tony