Remember last week we discussed books about robots in the HOPE thread? Both books arrived today. One of them, "How to design & build your own custom robot" by David Heiserman, is very deep -- heavy reading. The other, "How to build a computer-controlled robot" by Tod Loofbourrow, contains a reasonable project that we as a group can build (but not in time for HOPE unless we really bust ass.) In the preface of Loofbourrow's book, he wrote: "I want to thank the members of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey, whose suggestions have helped make Mike (that's what he calls the robot -EK) what he is today." Googled the author. He went on to a nice career in robotics. I sent him an intro tweet via our official VCFed account. Apparently he lives in the Boston area. Maybe we can get him down to the museum for a talk one day.
On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Remember last week we discussed books about robots in the HOPE thread? Both books arrived today. One of them, "How to design & build your own custom robot" by David Heiserman, is very deep -- heavy reading. The other, "How to build a computer-controlled robot" by Tod Loofbourrow, contains a reasonable project that we as a group can build (but not in time for HOPE unless we really bust ass.)
In the preface of Loofbourrow's book, he wrote: "I want to thank the members of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey, whose suggestions have helped make Mike (that's what he calls the robot -EK) what he is today."
Googled the author. He went on to a nice career in robotics. I sent him an intro tweet via our official VCFed account. Apparently he lives in the Boston area. Maybe we can get him down to the museum for a talk one day.
You might want to show a comparison of then present day robot technology. A lot of which inspired many of us during the 70s to build our homebrew robot projects. There were several people on the fore front of robot technology, beginning with Hans Moravec and his Stanford cart robot with vision recognition. He is currently a faculty member at the Robotics Institute at CMU here in Pittsburgh. http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm And there was some industry projects, most popular among them, Shakey. Designed by some of the leading computer scientists of the era, including Bertram Raphael a former student of Marvin Minsky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_the_robot There were even notable research projects from the 60s too And there were books about this too, just don't recall which ones without looking yet. I can try to dig out my motors used in my old robot project from Loofbourrow's book Dan
On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Remember last week we discussed books about robots in the HOPE thread? Both books arrived today. One of them, "How to design & build your own custom robot" by David Heiserman, is very deep -- heavy reading. The other, "How to build a computer-controlled robot" by Tod Loofbourrow, contains a reasonable project that we as a group can build (but not in time for HOPE unless we really bust ass.)
In the preface of Loofbourrow's book, he wrote: "I want to thank the members of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey, whose suggestions have helped make Mike (that's what he calls the robot -EK) what he is today."
Googled the author. He went on to a nice career in robotics. I sent him an intro tweet via our official VCFed account. Apparently he lives in the Boston area. Maybe we can get him down to the museum for a talk one day.
I dug out some more stuff last wknd One is the SVI-2000 Robot arm I mentioned that was interfaced to the C64 And one of the motors I used to build my robot from the 70s in Tod Loofbourrow's book I don't know which storage box the other 2 motors might be sitting in yet But you can see from the pic, it's big enough break your toe - or your skull :) There are powerful enough to carry me, but before when I was skinny http://rogtronics.net/pics/robot/motor70s.jpg but I can ship this too if you'd like in time for Hope and Maker Faire, This was found at Herbach & Rademan, a very popular surplus supplier they were located in Philly back then, and it's still around to this date, they moved to Morristown http://www.herbach.com/ I already have a box for the robot arm and there's room left, with plenty of foam The robot arm will include a prototype interface so Jeff can run it on his C64 I'll just pick it up later when I visit again. Dan
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Dan Roganti -
Evan Koblentz