19 Jan
2025
19 Jan
'25
5:49 a.m.
On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 12:51 PM ben via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Old relays work better!
Thinking of some sort of robot I read about from 1960's book.
Philips publshed a book called 'Practical Robot Circuits, I think in
the 1960s. Most of the book described a robot 'dog' that would respond
to light and sound, turn to and lick warm food ,and so on. I seem to
remember the electronics was based on D-series (1.5V filament) B7G
based (7 pin miniature) valves (tubes).
In the 1980s a UK magazine called 'Hobby Electronics' published the
designs for the HEbot. This had quite simple but ingenious electronics
using simple logic chips (4000 CMOS at least in part). Each sensor
system had an output to say it was active, these were fed to a
priority encoder, the output of which controlled a pair of analogue
multiplexers which routed the signal outputs of the highest-priority
active sensor to the motor drivers.
You can do an awful lot without microcontrollers.
-tony