Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #04586
To: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
From: DENNLILL dennlill@buffnet.net
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:51:30 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Tilden on TV...
You have a good point. I had gone out to produce my own SMD Bicore tiles
from which to work my own wizardry from. And it's not easy. Even though I
have the tiles now, many things become apparent about the design. Since
they don't come pre-assembled, assebmly is time consuming, especially on
the SMD level. (shaky hands!) And my boards are a pain to cut out. Right
now however I've built a rather clever stryder type robot that has some
pretty nifty skills at walking. I've noted a trick in the orientation of
the legs that gives it rather high lege clearence and at times virtually
no leg dragging. Right now I'm using it as a base to design some sort of
BRAIN using a 2dof head and some of my early, fancy, and yet untested
circuits that I devised to control and interpret signals from a depth
perceving head. More on that to come as the project continues.
IN general however, Mark T. has a great advantage with the pre-assembled
boards. However, for any individual, that must be ludicrously expensive.
Dennison
On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, John A. deVries II wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> jab
>
> Do you have a BEAM question? Try one of the following sites -- they really
> help!
> BEAM Robotics Tek FAQ http://people.ne.mediaone.net/bushbo/beam/FAQ.html
> BEAM Mailing List Archive http://www.egroups.com/list/alt-beam/
> BEAM Online http://www.beam-online.com/
> Chiu-Yuan's BEAM Page http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/6897/
> BEAM Heretics http://www.serve.com/heretics/
>
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