Very cool. I like the old school analog controller. As a young man I made many trips to Radio Shack to pick up 555 times and other supplies to create circuits. No one bothers to use this kind of stuff anymore since Arduinos and PICs are so straightforward and readily available. The old analog circuit approach is a lost art.
I'd love to see the arduino versions video, this design is so wonderful to me, I have been using it to write a book with the walking mechanism being the inspiration for a type of mech
Success. I support you so much. He needed advice. How do I start with Arduino? Are there massive libraries or free books ?? How did you learn electronics?
I always thought that the analog robotics was the way to go, but microcontrollers have taken over too soon, evolution has shown us that it's solutions are always more efficient. if we could just emulate nature. You've done a grat job already combining different inputs to influence directly a desition, that's kinda like nature does it.
I kinda want to make a pcbway design for it, cause it's really only 555 timers and a handful of resistors but I don't know if there were enough to merit making a batch of PCBs.
not what i imagined analog but atleast not arduino. analog to me is just motors and mechanical relays all set to trigger by certain predictable movements. using a microphone for crude design and some more motors for mechanically inducing resonance from a string in a bottle used to project sound waves and the microphone to detect the reflection. problaby need some alanog filter to determine what sound that represent what to act as trigger for action. the advantage is more realistic behavior. the disadvantage is noisy resonator. to make it more crude instead of using a micophone use a basic graphite buzzer by grinding pencils into grains and the place them in a small container an then connect a electrode on either side of the created buzzer element and then send electricity trough the circuit. now any sound waves chould cause the pencil grains to vibrate and cause the electric current to fluctuate. it probably also need a horn on the buzzer element to amplify the sound waves into the pencil grains. the more crude it is and the more it can do being such simple is what makes it cool.
I've seen the schematics for the smaller orange robot but not any for your blue larger one, the one demoed here. I find this one much more fascinating. Any plans on releasing schematics for this one? Great job by the way...I've been doing analog 'bots for years, and the 'lifelike' qualities really come thru with analog. Thanks.
I never made any formal schematics for the blue robot, the best I did was the board layouts. I realized I hadn't uploaded them, so I went ahead and put the files on Thingiverse. They're in format for a program called DIY Layout Creator. It may be possible to convert them into a PCB which would make assembly pretty quick and easy. www.thingiverse.com/thing:3459283
