Robot Age

[offy]

I am just wondering what age did you guys start building your first robot. I turned 14 about a month ago and I am working on my first robot and that is the $50 robot (Now around $125).

[TrickyNekro]

I started with electronics and basic kits at 12 -13...
But with robotics I started at 15 with a BS2... pure luck I would say...
They distributed it with a magazine at a price... got my attention and...
vualla got my first robot...


Lefteris

[Trumpkin]

somewhere around 9? with mindstorms rcx (if you can call that robotics).

[vidam]

I was around 26 when I built my first robot out of lego.

[pomprocker]

I was 26 when I first started the $50 robot back in February...now 27.

[Fredrik Andersson]

I keep reading about people here being really young and still building robots and I think it's so cool. I always identified myself as being an early intellectual bloomer, starting to program at the age of 13. I felt so cool doing this kind of serious stuff and knowing advanced stuff that others didn't. It did not only make me feel cool, but it provided me a huge boost in school and mental growth. I suddenly had a purpose in my life, a path - I had decided to become a game developer when i grew up. Geeky stuff really is great for young people as it often provides both play and challenge that stimulates growth and intellect.

Anyway, to finally answer the question, I started building robots a year ago, and was just turning 18 at that time. I had the interest for robots several years before that, but felt it was not my area to work at, but cool nevertheless. I began feeling that game development wasn't as fulfilling for me as it once was. I felt I needed to contribute to the world in some way and I didn't count in entertainment here. Then, after watching the Transformers movie and checking the internet if there was any real "transformers" (and there is!) and sliding onto watching lots of robot videos, I decided to change my interest from game development to building robots. Soon after that I ordered my first parts!

Now things have developed to be even better for me! Right now I'm in college studying a Master of Robotics program!

Keep it up all you young geniuses!

[offy]

Since I was 12 I have been building websites and making some simple programs. At age 13 I opened my web design business and I got some good money from that.

[Ro-Bot-X]

I was amazed by R2D2 back in my mid grade school years and Johny 5 from Short Circuit movie topped it off. Unfortunately at that time I had only Mecano (Erector in US) sets to play with, but I have built replicas of those robots (no electronics). Then I started learning electronics as an extracurricular activity (not much done at first) and in the High School I have built from scratch my own Walkman cassette player (since I couldn't afford to buy one). Then a digital alarm clock (like those radio clocks with LED display you can buy for 10 dollars) back in 86 I think. Going to US in 2000 allowed me to find Nuts & Volts and there I saw that people are building real robots. After a little research on internet, I have decided to get a Mindstorms kit in early 2001 and that was when I programmed my first Johny 5 alike robot, at the age of 32... (I guess I'm old, huh?). Participating at diverse Lego robotics competitions made me want to learn more and more, so after a while I decided to switch to non Lego robotics. I have started with the easy to work with Nemesis micro (programmed in Basic), then someone introduced me to AVRs and that was it. I still have a lot to learn, especially in programming, too bad I don't have the time to go to coledge to get a degree in robotics, even at this age.

I think robotics is the future as an engineer and it takes special people to do it. I envy all of you teenagers! Don't give up! Keep working on your robots, if you think it's too hard, start with something simpler, like the Lego NXT, learn how things work, get some satisfaction, then go to more advanced stuff, like building your own microcontroller board.

[sotu]

I started to get interested in how electronic toys worked at an age of 12, when i first got my remote controlled robot dog. It started by putting things appart and looking at theyre circuits and all. I cant really remember how it developt from that point, but now im 15, and i've built my first real robot (ive built two but the first was not really a sucsess) - Im on my second now, where i include RC and a cam.
Two weeks ago i started to learn programming in C++, so im on the right track. Im on the last year of high school and im kind of nervous on how to go on, is it best to go common secondary school, then go on the study perhaps any robotic related. Or go vocational school.
I dont really now whats the best to go if i want to land on anything regarding robotics/making circuits or programming machines.

[salixfire]

I started with computers since I was about 3 when my parents got a brand new 386 Intel PC. I learnt to do simple programming within DOS to set up simple menus etc. When I was about 4 onwards I started to learn to take computers and other electronic bits and pieces apart and put them back together again, a year or so later they actually worked again when I did this  I always wanted to do build something from scratch but growing up where I did females didn't really get to do thing like wood shop or things like that. So when I finally moved to the UK I went and did a degree in cybernetics and got my masters. That was about 3 years ago and since then I had to stop due to various reasons. I started back up again about a month ago after being reminded how fun it was and have started the $50 robot to remember what I learnt. It's surprising how quick you can forget stuff if you haven't touched it in a while.

[sotu]

I started with computers since I was about 3 when my parents got a brand new 386 Intel PC. I learnt to do simple programming within DOS to set up simple menus etc. When I was about 4 onwards I started to learn to take computers and other electronic bits and pieces apart and put them back together again, a year or so later they actually worked again when I did this  I always wanted to do build something from scratch but growing up where I did females didn't really get to do thing like wood shop or things like that. So when I finally moved to the UK I went and did a degree in cybernetics and got my masters. That was about 3 years ago and since then I had to stop due to various reasons. I started back up again about a month ago after being reminded how fun it was and have started the $50 robot to remember what I learnt. It's surprising how quick you can forget stuff if you haven't touched it in a while.

3 years :S? Aren't that very early for DOS programs ?

[TrickyNekro]

I started with computers since I was about 3 when my parents got a brand new 386 Intel PC. I learnt to do simple programming within DOS to set up simple menus etc. When I was about 4 onwards I started to learn to take computers and other electronic bits and pieces apart and put them back together again, a year or so later they actually worked again when I did this  I always wanted to do build something from scratch but growing up where I did females didn't really get to do thing like wood shop or things like that. So when I finally moved to the UK I went and did a degree in cybernetics and got my masters. That was about 3 years ago and since then I had to stop due to various reasons. I started back up again about a month ago after being reminded how fun it was and have started the $50 robot to remember what I learnt. It's surprising how quick you can forget stuff if you haven't touched it in a while.

3 years :S? Aren't that very early for DOS programs ?

Well, I started playing with an Amiga 500 back then... but only insert disk and play games... dos programming? LOLzzz no offense....

[airman00]

DOS programming at 3?
wowzers

[salixfire]

It was simple things that I was being taught, like a little menu that allowed you to choose what game you wanted to play using batch files. It was like learning to read and write for me, it was just on a computer. It wasn't like I was writing my own program without any help. I was only young. 

[ArcMan]

DOS programming at 3?

Oh yeah?  I started assembly programming in the womb.  My mom said I was born with an 8080 development board in my hands.  It was kinda painful for her.

[offy]

I want to believe that but I can't. If you did DOS programming at 3 than you would be famous. The youngest programmer is 9 - 12 years old.

[salixfire]

I didn't say I did particularly difficult things, just a couple of simple menus, editing autoexec.bat and config.sys so my games would work. I remember having to reformat my computer multiple times cos I had screwed up. I said that I learnt to do simple programming in DOS, though did I say it was at 3? I apologise if that's what my post makes it sound like, I was just going in the order I was remembering things. I can't exactly recall what age I did what but I do know I was being taught from about 3 and was under 10 due to leaving the country (and hence my tutor) and I'm fairly sure it wasn't too close to the latter as we had changed to Windows 3.1 a couple of years previous.

[ArcMan]

When I was 3, I learned to quit crapping my diapers

[Webbot]

The past is irrelevant - you're only as good as you are today.   We've all been there....

I started by building (ie soldering) a 4040 computer on vero/strip board with wires everywhere- a 4 bit processor (that preceded the 8080 and 8086 that were later used in PCs that didn't exist at the time, and Windows was just a sparkle in Bills baby milk bottle) with a small calculator display, drew loads of current, and to program it you had to turn your assembler into machine code and punch it in via a hex keyboard (ie only keys: 0-9, A-F, Go, Address, Enter).

Then I made my own Sinclair MK14 (came with a whole 256 bytes of RAM!!) and lost your program when you turned it off. So built a cassette interface to write programs to/from tape (no such thing as 'home' disk drives back then let alone 'hard drives').

Then soldered together an Acorn Atom (you even had to solder each key onto the kbd!). Then bought a BBC - already built thank God.

Made a living writing home computer games for several years - but, hey, that was in the early 1980's.

First PC was a Toshiba which came with dual floppy drives - no hard drive.

When PCs came out I wrote a business app in assembler which was installed in 1000's of companies - it had it's own multi-tasking kernel and drove green screens (Unix style) under DOS and it all ran it 64k no matter how many users you added. So 5 users, say, running from a standalone 8MHz IBM PC with 256k RAM - this was before we could network computers together. So about as powerful as an ATMega32 !!

blah blah - it's a sad life - but it's mine

Don't remember how old I was (I'm too old to count) - but it's irrelevant anyway. Old technology, etc  etc.

Welcome to the New World

[Admin]

We old folks are at a disadvantage . . . we didn't have things like the internet and SoR to show us how to make robots

[pomprocker]

oh i thought this thread was about robots not computers....ok

My first family computer was a 1981 TRS-80 Color Computer  (I now collect TRS-80 stuff by the way) accessing BBS at 300baud   (didn't learn to program this early =P)

First PC was a 386 or 486 with a TURBO button running windows 3.11. First ISP was prodigy back in the mid 90s.

Learned to program on QBASIC that came with windows.

[TrickyNekro]

oh i thought this thread was about robots not computers....ok

My first family computer was a 1981 TRS-80 Color Computer  (I now collect TRS-80 stuff by the way) accessing BBS at 300baud   (didn't learn to program this early =P)

First PC was a 386 or 486 with a TURBO button running windows 3.11. First ISP was prodigy back in the mid 90s.

Learned to program on QBASIC that came with windows.

I never understood what this turbo thing was.........

[airman00]

I never understood what this turbo thing was.........

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/case/switchTurbo-c.html

[ArcMan]

My understanding is that the "turbo" button was used for some old games that didn't play in "real time".  They used the system clock ticks for timing, so a faster computer would make the game play super fast.  So you could turn off "turbo" and play your game at the speed for which it was designed.