Just been bitten by the robot bug.

With the prospect of meeting similar-minded geeks — although probably somewhat younger than my own 5+ decades — I'm wondering who's out there and what they are doing.

As a kick-off:

I'm a semi-retired computer scientist-cum-various other careers with a background in s/w engineering and electronics.

For many years I ran a small company in downtown Melbourne doing number-crunching for govt and commercial clients, but have now moved over to the dark side and re-animated my interests in ALIFE (but *not* AI, since that's mainly concerned with talking to dolphins, as we all should know by now .

I'm presently casting around for various kits and parts, and am assembling quite a few while the AUD holds up above .80 USD.
[UPDATE Aug 17 -- it's just fallen below 79!]

My main thrust at the moment is austomatic programming — i.e. where a DESCRIPTION of the behaviour of a robot, together with some laws of physics about the world the robot operates in,
are compiled by a fairly tricky piece of s/w
to a low-level language (like MBASIC or SCHEME) that will actually drive those servos and motors.

Apart from that I'm renewing my aquaintance with skinned knuckles, split nails, burned fingers and HLS (high-level swearing).

I'm interested in the long term in arranging some face-to-face meetings, demos and all that sort of geek-club-like things. And am quite prepared to fork out low grade cash to keep such things going.

So who are you, are what are you and your proxies doing?

-kym

Hello everyone.  My name is Dave.  I live in Perth, but I am from Darwin.  I have been interested in robotics since I started plugging speaker wires into my APPLEII joystick.  The APPLEIIe had one annunciator pin that I could POKE high to a RC car.

The mechanical engineering area of robotics systems fascinates me.    I also enjoy designing control processes for devices. 

I have a RC Tank-Track Esky up on the bench in the shed for repairs.   It has blown switches.  It has a custom fibreglass shell that was painted camo by an artistic friend of mine.  It can carry 24 stubbies….but its innards are prototype only..

 I am setting up a wireless robotics shed in the yard.

 I cannot see any further optimization beyond placing a wireless laptop with eletric-wheels, a grappler arm,  batteries and a recharging station- so that is the budget plan.

 Does anyone have any project ideas I might be able to help with?

dave

Just before I delete some of these old photos, here's my "garage computer" that was a left-over from my business 1999-2004.

Presently the garage roof (where this cluster lives) is caved on from a storm a couple months back, so the h/w is not used much at present.

Pictured is about 1/8 of the iron we had set up for "exaflops" in downtown Melbourne.

Obviously "shoestring" is one of my middle names, but the customer was only buying teraflops, not a coat of paint or a pretty secretary.

I learned a lot about throwing PC's together in a hurry — we had a schedule that involved putting up about 100 boxes per month over the period I operated the business — as well as the effort needed hoiking them all up and down and up and down 5 or 6 flights  of stairs in one of the older buildings in Elizabeth St.

But I also learned a lot about commercial leases,  how much juice you can draw out of a line, blackmail by shifty landlords, meeting deadlines with 6-figure financial penalties, and completely disorganised customers with gaping holes between what they believed their contract was about and what actually they had signed.

The sound level from a slew of oldish boxes is  pretty deceptive.

It sounds loud when you first go in the room, but after about 10 mins it fades since it's just white noise. I also liked the idea of spending the night in the office from time-to-time (against the lease, of course — but let's not tell the landlord coz the noise would send me right off to sleep and I'd wake up pretty refreshed — even with my head on the desk and sitting in an over-stuffed office chair.

But when you went outside again, you realised you were temporarily deaf!

I also started to notice a definite "pressure" feeling after working in the envirnoment a short while. After a couple years it turned into a mild ache.

The DAMNED HEAT on the other hand, was completely unbearable! Over the time I was operating in Eliz St there were some record heat days and City Power tended to fail. Not that the building a/c was much chop against 500+ PC's going flat chat, anyway.

We eventually solved that problem by opening the windows (it was an OLD building) and blowing the heat out of there using 6 large standard fans.

On a winters day, the heat was quite another matter. Ahhhh. Toasty warm!

Hey guys, Im the same as Shock, I prefer working on miniature robotics.

A project I'm working on at the moment is on a slightly larger scale. Its around 1 foot tall and kind of resembles a "tachikoma" from "Ghost in the Shell". Just a fun project, as it will walk on its six legs and zip around on retractable  wheels. Long ways to go yet though.

Glad to be here and meet like minded people!

Cheers Ash! I'll be sure to blog my project here as it gets it more underway. I'm working on Chassis and shell design at the moment.

Can I ask what city your from Ash? If your from Melbourne do you happen to know any good electronics shops near the CBD or even Australian Electronics Branches?