It's been a long strange road.
Although I started my interest in robotics young, it was only to build articulated models. Someone tried turning me on to plastic toy models of robots that you just built and funny thing was, the first thing I asked them is "Where's the fun in that -- they've already built it!" I guess I really love making up my own stuff.
I started studying more of the real stuff at The Evergreen State College. The Computer Applications Laboratory specialized in scientific computer interfacing and other scientific applications of computers (this is where I saw my first real analog computer). The lab manager, Porsche Everson, most kindly indulged me on a number of robotic and interface projects.
The first project that ate my time was a little circuit for decoding an 8-bit output to control a bank of 4 4-phase stepper motors. It was a bit ambitious for me as a first real project, but I managed to get it to hobble along.
My next project was a little "dumber", a simple wall following robot. I built it using an Erector set. There is nothing better for a weekend than discovering a big bag of erector set parts in a thrift store for a couple of bucks, I'll tell you what!
I went small again and built this little six-legged walker in a toilet paper tube. I was getting quite a kick by this time building things from discarded stuff. Why not look to one of the most ubiquitous items in our culture?
I went larger again this time, and back to my erector set. Another six-legged walker (I was really enjoying the idea of a bug walking around) came out of my little corner workbench. I'm especially fond of this one because this is when I started using extruded aluminum and making up parts, such as the legs and leg shafts.
I've moved into a bit more software than hardware for the moment and was hammering out the bugs for a software version of my first project, the stepper motor driver, which uses the parallel port as a digital I/O port. I'm really liking how the app is shaping up. I was writing it in Delphi. I suppose I could also write it in LabVIEW, but dang it, it's just not as pretty! Besides, Delphi compiles way smaller than LabVIEW. On the downside, getting Delphi to talk to hardware is, well, not so trivial. But, I've been doing more in Visual Basic, plus I've run across routines to allow me to "peek" and "poke" locations via VB.
It's been a while since I've done much of this stuff, but the bug is always there, right under my skin. Just waiting...
