THREE ORIGINAL ADS
FOR RARELY SEEN
ROBOTS OF THE MID-
80s: The Hubot was
touted as the ultimate
appliance, with an
onboard computer,
TV, Atari 2600 game
system, and stereo. The
Gemini was one of the
most capable robots of
the era, with an excellent navigation system.
BOB held a special
position as the Cadillac
of the personal robots,
but unfortunately never
made it out of the lab.
THREE ORIGINAL ADS FOR RARELY SEEN
the Tomy Omnibots, were made in decent numbers
and are less precious. One of these would make a
great starter robot if you wanted to add a microcontroller brain. With either of these bots, you’re not
losing any original programming by installing new
brains. Anything you write is going to be more than
what was there to begin with.
PC — middleware that gathers information for the
bot, strips out anything extraneous, and transmits it
in some format the bot can understand. The program
could be as simple as a set of scripts that pull Google
data whenever you ask the robot what’s going on in
the world. Or it could pull down weather forecasts or
Wikipedia entries. Using this strategy, the robot can
act smart, even if the AI hasn’t caught up yet.
Put It Online
Once you get your robots going and upgraded so
they can talk over your home network, what comes
next? Why not give them some additional smarts
by letting them use the internet! You could do this
directly with a PC controller onboard your bot, or
else by running an “infomediary” application on the
For vintage robot user groups, serial-to-wireless
module sources, and other online resources, see
makezine.com/19/oldbots.
Robert Doerr runs robotswanted.com, robotworkshop.com,
and robotgallery.com. He also writes for Servo magazine.
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