mckenney@talos.pm.com (Frank McKenney) (07/30/90)
The ubiquitous MOVIT series of "Educational Electronic Robot
Kits" is now available from a new vendor:
American Design Components
815 Fairview Avenue
P.O. Box 220
Fairview, New Jersey 07022
(800) 776-3700 / (201) 941-5000 in N.J.
Compared to most of the equipment previously discussed in this
group, these are definite ToyBots. On the other hand, for those
with small budgets and an urge to tinker, these kits may be a
good place to start. Should prove good substitutes for an
automated plant when trying to explain to small children "What
Daddy Really Does". Prices range from $42.95 to $129.95.
Intelligence level ranges from sub-moron to total idiot.
Name Price Description
---- ----- -----------
Robotic Arm 49.95 Looks fairly lightweight. Grab/release,
raise/lower, pivot side-to-side. Hand-
held control.
Medusa 42.00 Four-legged plastic dome w. sound
sensor.
Mr. Bootsman 49.95 6 insect-like legs, two-speed movement.
Hand-held control.
Navius 69.95 Two motor-controlled wheels, guided by
marks on a "programming disk"
S-Cargo 59.95 Mororized. Start/stop/turn via sound
sensor.
Avoider 59.95 Description says 3 legs (although photo
shows 3 per side). Detects obstacles
via infra-red sensor, turns, and
continues.
Line Tracer 49.95 Follows black line drawn on white
paper.
Circular 99.95 Drive and electronics form the "axle"
for two large "wheels". Hand-held
control.
WAO 129.95 Progammable (128x4 RAM!) motorized
line-drawing robot. Connector port can
be used with optional AppleII/IBM
PC/Commodore C-64 to "communicate"
(presumably download/control).
--------------------------------------------------------
Frank McKenney, President | {uunet,rti}!talos!mckenney
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--------------------------------------------------------ins_atge@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Thomas G Edwards) (08/01/90)
In article <1990Jul30.004821.27254@talos.pm.com> mckenney@talos.UUCP (Frank McKenney) writes: >The ubiquitous MOVIT series of "Educational Electronic Robot >Kits" is now available from a new vendor: >Compared to most of the equipment previously discussed in this >group, these are definite ToyBots. On the other hand, for those >with small budgets and an urge to tinker, these kits may be a >good place to start. At Hopkins we are working on "neural" analog VLSI chips. It occured to us that these "Toybots" would make cheap, simple platforms for testing student project chips. Various senses can be added ("whiskers", "ears" (perhaps using Carver Mead's electronic ear chip), "eyes" (using focal system on chip surface for things like the See/Hear Chip)). Anyway, we have obtained a couple of them, and although we haven't mounted any of the chips on them yet, they provide an interesting diversion around the lab :-) -Thomas Edwards
green@ai.toronto.edu (Anthony Thomas Green) (08/01/90)
Ah yes, the MOVIT. Here's a fun project a friend and I did last year: The MOVIT robot has a powerful (:-) 4 bit controller which we promptly disconnected from the motors and removed. We then interfaced a 6809 to the motors and wrote a LOGO-like interpreter in Concurrent Euclid. The robot could perform all of our LOGO commands, with one nifty twist. We wrote an ON-KEY-DO command which would map key strokes on to LOGO procedures. A keyboard monitoring task would watch for these keys and inform the interpreting task, which would push what it was doing on to a stack and jump to the requested procedure. For instance, ON 'T' DO TWIST_AND_MOVE TO SQUARE (SIDE) REPEAT 4 FORWARD SIDE RIGHT 90 END REPEAT END TO TWIST_AND_MOVE RIGHT 20 FORWARD 20 REVERSE 20 LEFT 20 END Now if we ran SQUARE 100, and hit 'T' a bunch of times, the interpreter would nest all of the TWIST_AND_MOVE procedures, causing the robot to do a little jig. Eventually it would finish everything up and sit where it began. The system was clever enough to know that if it was interrupted in the middle of a FORWARD 100, by an ON-KEY-DO, it would finish it up when it returned. Anthony T. Green green@ai.toronto.edu