Sam you don't have to be a kid. I belong to the DPRG (Dallas Personal
Robotics Group)...we;re grown men who always wanted to those very
things. We meet once a month, several times a month for dinner and a
couple of times a month informally in some one's garage to work on our
'bots. We have careers, families, mortgages and all of the other
distractions of m,odern life. We salvage components, use what ever we
can find, beg, borrow, scrounge to build our machines. We hold a
contest twice a year to demo our skills. We fabricate PC boards for
subassemblies. It's a lot of fun...I just wish I had more spare tiome
for it.
James
Sam Ismail wrote:
>
> I was just thinking about how kids these days are so damn lucky. They've
> got all this cheap, extraodinarily useful computer hardware sitting around
> in massive quantities that they can do all sorts of killer things with.
>
> I remember when I was a kid I was dreaming about building robots and using
> computers to control them, but all the parts and expecially the computers
> were too expensive. I had one design based on a //c, but this was around
> 1986 when the //c was still relatively new.
>
> Today, a kid could go to a thrift store and buy all manner of salvageable
> computer parts, including printers (to get the steppers and gears out of),
> disk drives (for the motors and gear shafts) and of course the computers
> to control their projects with easy to use languages built in, all for
> just a few bucks.
>
> An entire robot could be built for under $100 with thrift store and flea
> market parts. It could include a fairly powerful and easy to program
> "brain" in the form of a Commodore 64, a Tandy CoCo, even an Apple ][
> board. This stuff is everywhere and extremely simple to hack.
>
> Man, I wish I was a kid again!
>
> Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ever onward.
>
> September 26 & 27...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0
> See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details!
> [Last web site update: 09/12/98]
Received on Fri Sep 18 1998 - 21:38:29 BST