A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:
You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.
The original Furby was interesting on this front, I have one controlled by a Pi Zero using a motor controller and LED driver board (you need an LED for the cam position sensor, and this way I could backlight the eyes with RGBs too). Every expression the thing can make is driven by a single motor via a series of gears and cams, so it's pretty straightforward to get up and running. The main issues are that clearance is really tight and the gearbox is pretty noisy.
My eventual plan is to hook it up to an LLM and use it like the world's most uncanny Alexa, but there's an issue with the audio board I've not got around to fixing yet. Got a bit sidetracked by the server software which I'm using as an excuse to learn Cats Effect properly.
Same with some of the older Wowee stuff, Robosapien, Roboraptor, etc. In-box ones are expensive as collectors items, but you can grab ones that are missing the remote for cheap and then it’s a fun project to reverse engineer the IR signals with a Pi or Arduino or something like that.
If you have a FlipperZero it has an IR port that could probably work for this too.
If you don't have a FlipperZero, don't get one for this. there are cheaper options.
Neat, they have Newt, the robot my dad built that was the first mobile robot with its own onboard computer. Newt is still there in his basement, and as a kid I did science fair projects programming behaviors for it. At that point the computer had been upgraded to a Motorola 68K. https://www.theoldrobots.com/Newt.html
I love and miss when the web had a higher concentration of focused, individually curated sites like this one. It's a sort of charming and quaint electronic folk art. I can sense the love and attention that went into creating it.
Previously on HN: The Old Robots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159653 - May 2018 (15 comments)
The robot arms from decades ago look the same as todays, slightly different choice of colours but thats it.
[delayed]
Oh wow, the second link I randomly clicked turned out to be the one on the Mr. Money toy robot I had as a child: https://www.theoldrobots.com/mrmoney.html What a "coin"cidence (ba-dum-tss). It's probably still somewhere in the attic.
I also had one of these! I don't know where it is, it used to be on my (or my brother's) dresser, but I forget if I grabbed it when my mom sold the house. Wonder if it still has money in it.
Still got mine from my childhood. Just put a battery up his bum and tested him. Works perfectly! There was no money inside him though.
My brother still has Mr DJ and Dingbot. This site's got me interested in whether they still work too.
Wow, talk about a blast of nostalgia. I had a few of those as a kid. I do see one popular robot missing, Mr. Robot by Westminster, which could shoot foam discs, walk around, dance, and rotate his head. Seems like they have a similar robot: http://www.theoldrobots.com/StarDefender3.html
Some of these, including one I had as a kid, produce sound through a small gramophone inside. No electronic amplification at all, just a needle on a tiny "record", mechanically connected to some kind of speaker shaped cone.
Here's someone taking apart the exact robot I had, and showing that mechanism: https://www.windytan.com/2013/02/the-atomic-powered-robot.ht...
Missing Pulsar from Pulsations Night Club outside Philadelphia. In the 80's, it would deliver cocaine and cocktails to people. I think that it was also the robot from one of the Rocky movies too.
https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184
Crazy times growing up back then.
I just want to say this is an amazing resource and I'm planning to share it with my 5yo son's computer club. Would be super interested if anyone has any similar resources.
As a robot-obsessed kid I remember surveying a lot of these (I definitely read through this site at one point too) and realizing, damn, they really are all toys. I'm not sure any of them actually could do anything useful, even the ones with robot arms because those robot arms were always incredibly imprecise.
No mention of the HERO-1? Seems like a huge gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)
It's in his collection
https://www.theoldrobots.com/images5/pc507c.JPG
https://www.theoldrobots.com/images48/robots17.JPG
Found the page for them here https://www.theoldrobots.com/hero.html
Wow this was fun! I had no idea Bushnell (the atari guy) tried his hand at robots: https://www.theoldrobots.com/bob.html
I mean he did create Chuckie Cheese and all the animatronic cast members, which are basically robotic band members.
Nice demonstration of the Tokima Robot Watch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nlqk9YtQFSo
thanks for this - this has inspired me to try and do a rebuild of the tokima robot watch, have a bunch of microcontrollers and screens lying around, and need to make them into a little robot buddy
Holy crap. I realized that I have had, at one time or another, at least 8 of these robots before my 20s, all of them I tried to improve in one way or another, which got me started on the at2313 (?) chip from armed and started my microcontroller journey. Before that I was either programming on my 6502 machine or designing logic and chips processors on my own “ISA” lol.
beeeaauuuutiiifuuul
