I might have to have a Rovio. See http://www.meetrovio.com/. It’s a robot with a webcam and web-based control interface. You can drive it around and look at stuff with it. It looks like it’s the ultimate weapon for terrorizing the cats.
Yeah, okay, it’s pretty geeky. Time for some personal history. I became interested in computers in the first place because I wanted to build a robot when I was a kid. I figured out pretty quickly that the robot needed a brain of some sort, and that meant a computer. So I started learning about computers, mostly from books at the public library.
This was 30 years ago, almost exactly.
There was nothing like a Rovio on the market. There was no such thing as a PC, or webcams, or the web, or wireless networking. It was more or less a completely different world from the perspective of computer technology. Microprocessors were a recent development and computers like the Altair were just starting to hit the market. There was literally no place that you could buy off-the-shelf robot parts. Lego Mindstorms wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye yet. (I loved Lego nonetheless.)
Rovio pretty much embodies what I dreamed of building: a robot that I could drive around from some sort of control panel. I even thought that it would be super-cool if the robot had a TV camera so that I could see what it was looking at, but that was obviously out of the question. Ultimately I wanted the robot to be autonomous and be able to do stuff like roam around on its own and recharge itself when necessary. (Being able to recharge itself was considered nearly the pinnacle of robotic engineering at the time. It does imply a number of difficult tasks, like locating the charging station, navigating to it, and docking with it.)
It was, of course, a project completely beyond my grasp at the time. But the interest propelled me to learn a tremendous amount about computers and electronics. I never ended up building a robot but I’m now a successful software engineer (with my own successful software company, even) and I build electronic stuff as a hobby.
30 years have passed and technology has advanced to the point at which it’s possible to buy the robot I dreamed of for $300. That’s pretty amazing in itself. Will I buy one? I dunno. Somehow having someone else build it takes some of the fun out of it.
David L. Heiserman, “How To Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot.” I share your nostalgic retrospection; I bought a used copy of this via Amazon and was transported back to a time when if you wanted to follow a reference, you applied to the library’s interloan for the book and then (if you were lucky) photocopied large chunks of it… God I wish we’d had the internet back then. But would it’ve been so magical if you could’ve just nagged your parents for the robot as a Christmas present?
I had that book. I also had its precursor, “How To Build Your Own Working Robot”. That book involved massive amounts of TTL logic, if I remember correctly. I remember it took me awhile to figure out that the object in the photo on the cover couldn’t possibly be the outcome of the project in the book. By the time I got the book you mentioned, my family had an Apple ][+. I used it to run the BASIC simulations from the book.
I also wonder what it would be like to be that age now. There is so much more stuff readily available, like stepper motors and cheap microcontrollers; and so much information available online (obviously). Just being able to find datasheets in PDF form in a matter of seconds is an unbelievable luxury compared to how things were when I first became interested in electronics.