A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics | Hacker News Reader

A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics

technologyreview.com

126 pointsdanso61 comments

I remember saving birthday money and buying this at Radio Shack as a kid. It was pretty advanced for the time. Then I had the idea to try and make it remote controlled, or just fiddle with the internal electronics a bit. Joke was on me, there were no electronics, this thing was 100% mechanical. A single DC motor, and a fuck ton of gears that were engaged/disengaged by manipulating the two joysticks.

This toy probably equally inspired kids to go into robotics, or to design automotive transmissions.

Probably frowned upon here, but can I get a "fuck yeah!"?

This was the big lesson for me also. I finally got clearance to take it apart some years later to understand why it was so loud, so weak, so slow and what opportunities there were to connect it to the TI-99/4a.

It was a disappointing setup and I don't think I put it back together.

I did the same thing. My mom was pissed I took it apart.

I was disappointed with how it worked as well. The motor was reused in a different project later, there was no hope in me putting this one back together.

I would put the HERO (Heathkit Educational RObot) in both the same category and the era. [1] HERO came with "an optional arm mechanism and speech synthesizer was produced for the kit form and included in the assembled form". Huge influence on my own life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)

HERO was on an episode of Mr. Wizards' World. Man, did I want one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJDwO1z9qM4

Thanks for sharing. It is inspiring to see a passion for keeping HERO alive today. Here's a 4-part video from 2019 diving into HERO restoration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6eAQAZseuM

I ended up buying three of these as I was going to convert one to computer control. Last year at the ASVARO swap meet I sold the last one I had which had never been opened :-). The guy who bought it was pretty excited to have it (which is the goal of getting rid of one's junk right?)

They were marvels. The only "practical" way to convert them was to put solenoids on the controls to drive them and it was impractical for any repeatable fine grain control. If I ever get a chance to meet the person behind that design I'd certainly buy them a round of their favorite beverage.

https://archive.ph/wAqgu

I spent hours playing with mine in the mid 80's! The key takeaway - then and now - is that you can generate an incredible variety of motion with a single motor and a well designed gear-box; no software required!

I'm impressed Hiroyuki Watanabe was only 24 years old when he invented/led this.

> “I didn’t have a period where I studied engineering professionally. Instead, I enrolled in what Japan would call a technical high school that trains technical engineers, and I actually [entered] the electrical department there,” he told me.

I think this approach is sorely needed again, in the US at least.

The grass was so green back then. Today leaves are brown and there is a patch of snow on the ground.

I went to a technical high school for software engineering in Slovenia and it was fantastic. We learned C/C++, SQL, relational data modeling, basics of OOP, assembly for microcontrollers, IT administrator stuff, networking/internet, some basics of web development, a little about operating systems.

I did go to study CS after high school (despite getting a job midway through my senior year), but I still draw on the things I learned in high school every day. It was great. Gave me a lot of practical foundations.

There was a math and science school in my state but it was a boarding school, and that did not seem like a good idea for me.

We have technical high schools for all kinds of subjects all over the place. Our community colleges are also doing everything HN thinks they should be doing, and they started like thirty years ago.

Tandy Armatron Dissection http://www.starborneworks.com/?p=22

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMdmkONa7qs

Incidentally, planetary gears as clutches is also a feature in various Japanese VCR mechanisms.

When he mentions that a small piece of grit was fouling the gearbox and the pithy advice that small things can cause big problems reminded me of the toaster I fixed recently where I spent most of my time with the electrical aspects ruling out everything until I was left with the electromagnetic latch and after disassembly it turned out a very small toast crumb had found it's way inside and was in the way of a flush contact between the electromagnet and a steel plate. Just cleaning that out brought the toaster back to full function!

I had this thing and loved it but it WAS SO G$DD$MN LOUD!!!!!

It was like the sound of a pile of silverware dumped into a garbage disposal played at full volume over an AM radio.

Great controls, though.

It was made for Radio Shack by Tomy, who made lots of battery operated toys in that era that were very complex and clever amalgamations of plastic parts. My sister had Tomy's 'Dream Dancer', which was obnoxiously loud, though you don't see that in the advertisements. She never got a second set of batteries once the Christmas day set gave out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8ZP1pnP78

Yep. Sold in the UK as the Tomy ROBO-1. Had great fun playing with it, never knew people had hooked them up to computers. Echoing others' comments, the drive was noisy even when stationary. And it didn't seem to have any sensors to let it know when it had reached the limit of any particular motion. Instead the plastic gears would start to skip loudly with a usefully intuitive "if you keep doing that I'll break" sound.

They even made "fake" electronic games like Blip -- a version of Pong that was electromechanical rather than electronic. Presumably at the time that was a cheaper way to do things, but like mechanical watches it is in a way more impressive than using electronics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blip_(console)

We had Blip and a baseball game that tried to look like an electronic game but we instantly knew it was inferior to the "real" thing. Looking back on it now, the mechanical games were more impressive, even if the electronic games were more expensive due to the various ICs.

Though Blip used batteries, it didn't go through them anywhere near the rate something like Head-to-Head football did. The baseball game was completely human powered, making them both far more useful in our rural area where batteries weren't available without a trip to town. Plus batteries were an added expense.

A bit of lube may help quiet it down, but otherwise I think it's quite reminiscent of how a lot of heavy equipment at the time operated, with an engine that's idling whenever it isn't driving some part through a clutch.

The modern version of this is LEGO SPIKE:

"In 2020, LEGO introduced the SPIKE Prime kit as the next-generation successor to LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, boasting upgraded hardware, a more robust processor, and an improved programming environment designed for enhanced user-friendliness and intuitiveness. Following this, in 2021, LEGO launched SPIKE Prime Essential, specifically tailored for elementary-level students, incorporating age-appropriate components like mini-figures and mini-figure props within the kit. Nevertheless, its deliberate simplicity, while catering to younger learners, results in a lack of complexity." [1]

[1] LEGO SPIKE Essential or SPIKE Prime?

https://www.cmu.edu/roboticsacademy/spike-essential-or-prime...

A similar single motor robot hand has been made that uses electrostatic clutches instead of mechanical clutches[O].

[0]https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08469

There was an article in i think Radio Electronics at the time to connect it to a C64.

There was a pretty detailed article in the May 1985 Radio Electronics that mentioned interfacing it to a VIC-20:

https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1985-05/page/n...

Transactor Magazine volume 7, issue 4 (1987 ) had an article on interfacing it to a C64:

https://archive.org/details/transactor-magazines-v7-i04/mode...

Hot Coco had an article about hooking it up to the TRS-80 Color Computer.

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/Ho...

>By moving the joystick (a mechanical linkage), you select one of a series of rotating cams that connect a gear to the power shaft. This is probably the worst design possible for modification to electronic control.

At the time I was disappointed that it didn't use (non-existing) motors already in the Armatron but looking back at it with an understanding of the mechanical design, it's easy to see why they went with that decision. The only other choice would have been to connect to the joysticks themselves. The added motors probably improved the operation quite a bit.

Ahhh so it had only motor that got switched in and out mechanically, eh? That must be why it was always whirring even when not moving. I guess small motors were not cheap back then :)

The fact that someone has converted one to run on steam is very appropriate given that the single-power-source design was the norm for industry until the 20th century, and it's not hard to imagine in a steampunk universe a much scaled-up, metal version of this arm in a factory, powered by a lineshaft:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_shaft

I think an ideal steam-punk version of this would have multiple pistons instead of complicated gears, one for each degree of freedom, powered by a central boiler and controlled by brass valves. i.e. pneumatic, but steam instead of air.

We had one of these and it definitely sparked my long running interest in robotics. Which expanded into small scale robotics manufacturing and then onto 3d printing. I’m now playing with LLMs to discover ways to incorporate into smaller robots. More excited these days about what is to come.

Is my computer hacked or is everyone else seeing a giant subscribe banner on this page?

So I was curious about the Japanese domestic version and it was called Desk Top 144 - I've found a Japanese instruction paper with that name. It's also shown here amongst a dizzying array of SKUs including a mobile unit!

https://www.theoldrobots.com/images6/ar04.JPG

https://www.theoldrobots.com/armatron2.html

Seeing the Japanese manual the product was called ARMTRON. That makes sense to me. I think the Armatron is possibly a mistranslation of the romanization of Armtron.

Used to play with this. Always wanted one - my best friend had one

Is there a modern version of this as a toy for a kid?

Somewhat related to this. What would recommend for a young kid 5 and up to get start in today's robotics. The issue today seems more like there is a lot.. which is kinda opposite to what when I was growing up ( if it existed in toy form, it was prohibitively expensive at best ).

No personal experience with them, but KiwiCo seems popular to introduce kids to electronics:

https://www.kiwico.com/

Would it be possible to replicate this mechanism using Lego Technic bricks/mechanisms?

didn't read article due to paywall, but the answer is most likely yes. i was able to build a basic 2-degrees-of-freedom robot-arm grabber using lego technic and power functions and was controlled by scratch on a raspberry pi. lego also has pneumatics.

There's an industrial robot arm built out of LEGO Technic bricks by OrangeApps, a small company related to German robot manufacturer KUKA. [1] It's primarily used for educational purposes.

Disclaimer: I work for a subsidiary of KUKA.

[1]: https://www.orangeapps.de/?lng=en&page=apps%2Fers3

It would be much larger and very expensive but if it could be done it would be challenging to replicate using the same one motor and gear train design but I'm sure some LEGO wizard out there could pull it off given that we've seen some amazing LEGO builds in the past like mechanical calculators.

Oh man, I completely forgot I had a robot arm as a kid. I had the "Mobile Armatron" variant:

https://www.theoldrobots.com/armatron3.html

Oh man this takes me back. Armatron and Speak-N-Spell were so great!

Any recommendation on a robotic kit that can be purchased now?

OWI has a lot of robot arms. I built the wired controller version of this. As a software engineer building this gave me a lot of appreciation for making physical things. Trying to create a computer controlled version is tricky since you need something to indicate the current position of the arm.

https://owirobot.com/robotic-arm-edge-wireless/

I still have the muscle memory for these controls. I was completely gobsmacked when I disassembled it and saw the concentric rings of gears. Very very cool.

How does this thing work?

This video shows the innards of the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMdmkONa7qs

That is way cooler than I expected.

Gosh, no wonder it was so loud.

Hahaha. I had one and look at that I worked in robotics and AI. Never realized that before. Toys do have impact, don't they?

My little brother had one, circa 1985. I don't think the educational content was all that great, compared to our Apple II+.

I’m surprised these aren’t still made!

I wonder how far you could get in 2025 with cnc routers/lasers and 3d printers.

Friend had one of these. I think he got it from Radio Shack. This was right up their alley.

We still have one of these and it still works! Amazing.

Similarly driven by a single motor: furby

Mine is still in my parents' attic.

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