Bobot

Designing a robot isn’t so difficult for someone like me. I simply look and see what others did and then incorporate it into what I do. If I were writing, it would be called plagarism. Here in robot creation land we call it Open Source. In other words, a lot of the stuff out there about robots can be freely copied and used by the teeming masses with no fear of lawyers calling at all hours of the night making financial demands.

Here in my den of liquidity, disguised as a mild mannered hobby buff, I turn out robots and the brains that run them with all the natal productivity of single women living near military bases.

Maybe not that many.

I use anything at hand to create my mechanical children. Old Gilbert Erector Sets have given many a limb that they might be transplanted to one of my Frankensteins. But neither am I above buying a chassis kit from a robotics dealer –as the RobotShop so profitably knows.  But most of the time I just start out with one or two Tamiya dual motor and gearbox kits, a set of tires and wheels, and then see what happens.

Armed with the necessary tools of creation like chocolate pudding, Nilla Wafers, a cold Coke, and a willingness to fail, I press on with the task at hand. I keep screwing parts onto my project until it looks like something, then keep adding parts until it does something.  It doesn’t have to be much.

Then it is time to add the electronics that will listen to the relentless reports of the installed sensors. The brain will decide what to do about the information presented, although I will have already dropped some hints.

The big moment comes, power is applied, the robot takes off. And invariably runs into a wall.