Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #04583



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 09:07:37 -0600
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Tilden on TV...


At 10:48 PM 6/16/99 , Dorsey2001@aol.com wrote:
>Looking at Tilden and seeing how he can throw one together in an hour with
parts is just inspiring beyond belief

Kindly remember that the robot he built used his (relatively) new SMT
Bicore 2.x Tile boards. These consist of a number (about 100) of different
(approximately 12), pre-populated (that is, the parts are already soldered
on) tiles cleverly arranged so that you can literally cut out a
three-or-four tile section, solder a couple of jumpers and resistors and
the controller is finished. Mark designed these boards expressly for the
purpose of being able to build the control portion of robots quickly
because so much of the work has been done by automatic parts placement
machinery -- just putting together circuitry properly by hand is so
time-consuming. A given tile can contain, for example, pretty much a
totally wired complete UNICORE or four Nu neurons or a power controller,
etc. As a result, they are truly experimenter's tiles, almost like LEGO
blocks. By the way, they can be stacked vertically also so you can build
3-D circuits with only moderate effort.

Perhaps what is most impressive however, is the fantastic talent Mark has
for mechanical craftsmanship. Of course, this isn't news, but Mark
certainly is particularly blessed and he certainly does keep in practice.

On the other hand, I wasn't impressed with how the robot walked.
Furthermore, it was tethered -- given the way it walked, I'm not sure if it
would have done very well with the added weight of some sort of power system.


Zoz


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