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The Old Robots Web Site

theoldrobots.com

198 pointsjfil37 comments

A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:

You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.

The original Furby was interesting on this front, I have one controlled by a Pi Zero using a motor controller and LED driver board (you need an LED for the cam position sensor, and this way I could backlight the eyes with RGBs too). Every expression the thing can make is driven by a single motor via a series of gears and cams, so it's pretty straightforward to get up and running. The main issues are that clearance is really tight and the gearbox is pretty noisy.

My eventual plan is to hook it up to an LLM and use it like the world's most uncanny Alexa, but there's an issue with the audio board I've not got around to fixing yet. Got a bit sidetracked by the server software which I'm using as an excuse to learn Cats Effect properly.

The Furby + LLM is an amazing and hilarious idea. Please post about it if you do this, would love to see!

Same with some of the older Wowee stuff, Robosapien, Roboraptor, etc. In-box ones are expensive as collectors items, but you can grab ones that are missing the remote for cheap and then it’s a fun project to reverse engineer the IR signals with a Pi or Arduino or something like that.

If you have a FlipperZero it has an IR port that could probably work for this too.

If you don't have a FlipperZero, don't get one for this. there are cheaper options.

I recently bought a complete-in-box Radio Shack Armatron for $15, and I was super excited to have such a complete piece of history. I checked eBay out of curiosity, and was surprised by how cheap it was. I could have bought one any time, for not too much more.

And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.

Second this and to add the RadioShack Armatron is like this, a whole robot ark that runs off a single motor just by using clutches.

I'm a bit surprised at your language; robots that use cams and gears to make complicated motions all run from a single DC motors aren't "seemingly" sophisticated, they are very sophisticated. It's much easier to make something complicated with code than with cams.

I love and miss when the web had a higher concentration of focused, individually curated sites like this one. It's a sort of charming and quaint electronic folk art. I can sense the love and attention that went into creating it.

Oh wow, the second link I randomly clicked turned out to be the one on the Mr. Money toy robot I had as a child: https://www.theoldrobots.com/mrmoney.html What a "coin"cidence (ba-dum-tss). It's probably still somewhere in the attic.

I also had one of these! I don't know where it is, it used to be on my (or my brother's) dresser, but I forget if I grabbed it when my mom sold the house. Wonder if it still has money in it.

Still got mine from my childhood. Just put a battery up his bum and tested him. Works perfectly! There was no money inside him though.

My brother still has Mr DJ and Dingbot. This site's got me interested in whether they still work too.

One of the books I was obsessed with from my small town public library was simply titled "Robots" and it had some of these, including Odex1[0] which I still think is one of the cooler old-style robot designs, and AROK[1] which is the best, objectively, suck it Boston Dynamics and Elon. Unfortunately it's impossible to Google that book now.

I was obsessed with the Omnibot 2000, and for the brief and terrible time I was a Scout, I wanted to build the Gizmo robot in Boy's Life[2] but it was just a trash can with a motor. It bothered me to no end that Androbot[3,4] had no arms. The only real robot-type thing I actually had was an Armatron (the grey version.)

[0]https://www.theoldrobots.com/odex.html

[1]https://www.blackgate.com/2019/07/31/arok-the-robot/

[2]https://www.theoldrobots.com/GismoRobot.html

[3]https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topo_%28robot%29

I miss when the future was fun. Now we're going to get robots but they'll be designed to put us out of work or shoot us dead in the streets, and none of them will look nearly as interesting.

Mayhaps this is the Robots book? https://archive.org/details/robotskerk00kerk/mode/1up

Maybe?

I remember it having photos and not drawings. It might have been this one[0] with a different cover, but for the life of me I can't find the specific cover. I think the title had an orange font but it's been so long I might be misremembering things. Thanks for the effort though.

[0]https://archive.org/details/robots00barr

Previously on HN: The Old Robots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159653 - May 2018 (15 comments)

Neat, they have Newt, the robot my dad built that was the first mobile robot with its own onboard computer. Newt is still there in his basement, and as a kid I did science fair projects programming behaviors for it. At that point the computer had been upgraded to a Motorola 68K. https://www.theoldrobots.com/Newt.html

Wow, talk about a blast of nostalgia. I had a few of those as a kid. I do see one popular robot missing, Mr. Robot by Westminster, which could shoot foam discs, walk around, dance, and rotate his head. Seems like they have a similar robot: http://www.theoldrobots.com/StarDefender3.html

Some of these, including one I had as a kid, produce sound through a small gramophone inside. No electronic amplification at all, just a needle on a tiny "record", mechanically connected to some kind of speaker shaped cone.

Here's someone taking apart the exact robot I had, and showing that mechanism: https://www.windytan.com/2013/02/the-atomic-powered-robot.ht...

Missing Pulsar from Pulsations Night Club outside Philadelphia. In the 80's, it would deliver cocaine and cocktails to people. I think that it was also the robot from one of the Rocky movies too.

https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184

Crazy times growing up back then.

Wow this was fun! I had no idea Bushnell (the atari guy) tried his hand at robots: https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html

I mean he did create Chuckie Cheese and all the animatronic cast members, which are basically robotic band members.

I had this one in the 1950s: https://www.theoldrobots.com/Ideal.html

As a robot-obsessed kid I remember surveying a lot of these (I definitely read through this site at one point too) and realizing, damn, they really are all toys. I'm not sure any of them actually could do anything useful, even the ones with robot arms because those robot arms were always incredibly imprecise.

https://theoldrobots.net/ https://theoldrobots.org/

That John Deere walker is nuts

No mention of the HERO-1? Seems like a huge gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)

It's in his collection

https://www.theoldrobots.com/images5/pc507c.JPG

https://www.theoldrobots.com/images48/robots17.JPG

Found the page for them here https://www.theoldrobots.com/hero.html

The Hero-1 in Whiz Kids made me desperately want one back when I was about 11. I'm not sure why I wanted it, but I was very sure.

As a hat tip to my.past self I picked up a Hero Jr when it popped up in auction and man it was a hassle getting it shipped from the US auction house to Europe. Still not sure why I want it now I've got it though.

Nice demonstration of the Tokima Robot Watch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nlqk9YtQFSo

I just want to say this is an amazing resource and I'm planning to share it with my 5yo son's computer club. Would be super interested if anyone has any similar resources.

The robot arms from decades ago look the same as todays, slightly different choice of colours but thats it.

thanks for this - this has inspired me to try and do a rebuild of the tokima robot watch, have a bunch of microcontrollers and screens lying around, and need to make them into a little robot buddy

Holy crap. I realized that I have had, at one time or another, at least 8 of these robots before my 20s, all of them I tried to improve in one way or another, which got me started on the at2313 (?) chip from armed and started my microcontroller journey. Before that I was either programming on my 6502 machine or designing logic and chips processors on my own “ISA” lol.

i didnt see BigTrak in there.

should it be a robot? or was it just a kewltoy/LOGO primer ?

beeeaauuuutiiifuuul

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