Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #00827
To: dennison dennlill@buffnet.net
From: Chiu-Yuan Fang chiumanfu@home.com
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 20:07:00 -0800
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Overextension
Spoken like a true veteran. I like skimming the "outrageous" posts though...if
you read between the lines you can pull out many creative, more feasable ideas.
Anyways..back to building.
Chiu
> dennison wrote:
>
> I hate to be a bubble burster, but in light of recent (and past) discussion
> threads about things like Warrior BEAM bot's or Ant Hive bot's I would like to
> only slight temper the discusion with a tiny droplet of reality. Some of these
> discussion's are getting just nearly absurd in their proportions. Now I don't
> want to be acused of destroying creativity and insight, and experimentalism,
> but I think people have to think more with their heads. Robotics stuff is
> Actually mildy HARD stuff to do. Especailly reliably. It's fun to talk about
> microcore controlled stung gun rocket propelled portable incinerating cyborg
> invaders, and the battles between the Photopopper thermonuclear ionized pulse
> jet disrupter walkers, but please! lets be reasonable here people. One of the
> 'problems' with robotics is that it very quickly becomes 'oversold'.
>
> Real life example:
> I remeber over the summer at Carnegie Mellon, In Introduction to
> Electrical Engineering we all built these small robots to race in a
> competition at the end of the course, (My bot almost won also, out of only
> three?? bots who were actually ABLE to compete, but the batteries died. Darn
> dry cells) Anyway, some people had these big elaborate schemes about the
> things they would add to their robots, and how victorious they would be with
> them. When I mentioned that much of what they said really *couldn't* be done
> due to various logisitical problems (ones you learn only from experince) they
> mocked my advice simply because I wasn't so 'nerdish' about enginnering, and
> didn't exactly recieve good grades in the course *cringe* (too many pretty
> girls to talk too, what can I say?) But as it turned out, these people who had
> ton's of theory background in Digital logic and Ap physics and the such, had
> TREMENDOUS trouble just trying to get their machines to work. Many didn't
> even do that! Let alone building directional EMP pulse generators. The problem
> is that the Theory sounds much easyer than the implementation actually is.
>
> Whats the point to this story you ask?
>
> There is a great deal more that goes into robotics than even just the
> schematics and the parts. As I'm sure people have noticed robot's need the
> builder to take into account ton's of things, from the resistance of the FLUX,
> to the battery charge levels, to how the thing is supposed to acctually WORK.
>
> It's important to keep in consideration the SCOPE of the things we are trying
> to do here. While I highly applaud creativity and new ideas and enthusiasm,
> It's important for people to actually get something to work. As one of the old
> (and great) robotics book's said; "Forget the buzzers, and flashing lights,
> bells and whistles and frilly stuff till the end. It's hard enough to build a
> robot, and gimmicks will just make it harder to do so." So, my peice of
> opinion, (and not a harsh opinion either, more of a calm 'please do not start
> a flame war' type opinion):
>
> Let's first build something that WORKS. Then we'll add the EMP thermo-voltaic
> pulse gun.
>
> Dennison
--
Chiu-Yuan Fang
chiumanfu@home.com
ICQ=5614919
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/6897/beam2.html
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