The Robot Workshop
| These pages are just the beginning
of an ongoing project. The idea behind them is to continiuously collect
information at the workshops i am frequently doing and to turn this information
into an internet "how to build a..." or "what is a ...robot" brevier.
so far, i gave these workshos in Bremen (Germany), Karlsruhe (Germany) and Budapest (Hungary) and there is more to come in the nearest future (Linz in Austria and Karlsruhe again). in these sessions i try to teach robotics with a very "hands on" approach (let's just do it). within a couple of days the paticipants are confronted with a some very diverse topics: - the history of automata and
robots (Homunculus, Vaucanson's
duck, the chess-turk...).
we will take pictures of the little machines that we build and we will describe their design, functionality and programming. during the first workshop in
Bremen we build a very basic six-leg-crawling camerarobot and produced a
little videoclip with this device. the robot was controlled by an 8-bit
relay interface connecte to the parallel printer port of an old ibm-xt.
this very clumsy technology was later made obsolete through the availability
of the basic-stamp, a very easytouse microcontroller that is being
programmed in a very comfortable basic dialect. as the name already indicates,
this computer is very small (size of a stamp) and it consumes very little
power which makes it ideal for battery based aplications.
other groups working in a similar
field are very welcome to contribute to this project.
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