RAD the robot hack - was: subsumption

Looks there are different revisions. I saw a V2.0 and V4.0 on the ebay
site. Which one do you have? Do you know if there are significant
differences between them?

Looks a bit like it is tracked, like Jonny Five. Is that right?

--
Randy M. Dumse
www.newmicros.com
Caution: Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

A little bit like Johnny-5. There seem to be 4 different RADs. Original
RAD has the flattish lizardy head, and what I got in the first auction.
They're older and sell for more. I think $200 new originally. RAD2.0 is
very similar to RAD, but has a doggie-elfish head, and has more
flashing lights. Otherwise, it seems to be the same as RAD.

RAD3 and RAD4 appear to be much smaller, with different head. RAD3 is
tracked, I think,  and RAD4 a walker, I think. There have been a lot of
RAD2.0's on auction over the past 2 1/2 weeks since I started tracking
them.

I've talked to a couple of guys with these things, who never wanted to
hack them - not wanting to destroy the unity of the devices - so they
just sit in the closet. I wanted a hack-base, so I immediately took the
thing apart, and discovered it's trivial to remove the top unit without
damage, and to hack the base without drilling any holes at all. Making
it a regular mobile base, see here for starters ...

http://www.oricomtech.com/projects/rad-hack.htm

Probably not good for outdoors, but can run all over the house - except
the stairs.

Ah! Now I get it. That is a great base. Nice pictures.

--
Randy M. Dumse
www.newmicros.com
Caution: Objects in mirror are more confused than they appear.

No, it's on wheels that just happen to be in foot-shaped housings.  But
the legs/feet don't move at all.  Dennis brought a RAD2 and a RAD4 to
the last FRR meeting -- from what I've seen, RAD2 is by far the best
model.  The RAD4 can't move its arms at all, nor bend at the waist.

Best,
- Joe

Right. I was supposed to have said RAD3 had wheels instead of tracks.
Too bad, looks like they started with a really well-designed bot with
the first R.A.D. and RAD2.0, and then went cheap with the later ones.
The first 2 are very well made for toys. You should try a higher bid
than $7 for a RAD2.0, Joe :).

The problem is the shipping -- some of these guys want $30 or $40
shipping, which makes it well beyond my impulse-buy limit.  But maybe
I'll start snooping around local garage sales (when garage-sale season
starts up again); I could pay considerably more if I could just toss it
in the car.

Best,
- Joe

Most for shipping I saw was about $17. Try talking Dennis out of one of
his :).

You might like what we have done with our RAD 2.0:

http://www.rjunkworks.com/IEEEMRSC/ieeemrsc.html

We got ours for $10.00 from a neighbors garage sale.  It has built into it
some very nice H-Bridges that are TTL input with a TTL current limit output
to boot.  I did some "Brain Surgery" to him and removed his upper brain
functions (original u-processor) and injected my own TTL signals into his
low mobility brain functions (inputs to H-bridge).  I call it "Band-Saw
Engineering" since I just trace the circuit out and cut out the sections of
it with my band-saw that intrest me.  All the "heavy lifting" of circuit
design is still with the original engineer.  RAD 2.0 can now run from the
printer port of our laptop (do a Google on "parapin").

Travis Wood
http://www.rjunkworks.com/



http://toys.search.ebay.com/RAD-robot_Toys-Hobbies_W0QQcatrefZC6QQcoactionZcompareQQcoentrypageZsearchQQcopagenumZ1QQfposZ80304QQfromZR10QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQftrtZ1QQftrvZ1QQsacatZ220QQsadisZ200QQsargnZQ2d1QQsaslcZ2QQsbrftogZ1QQsofocusZunknownQQsubmitsearchZSearch

Thanks for the link, Travis. My previous efforts at tracking
down RAD-hacks on google didn't turn up very much.

One thing I did notice is that it's actually possible to
build a bot with this base no more than 3 1/2" tall.
I used the upper part of the base unit as part of my
platform, but that could also be discarded and a flat
deck simply mounted to the existing holes in the
lower part of the base. Looks similar to what you
did for  mounting your notebook PC.

Also, after some fiddling I discovered the motors
draw less than 1-Amp under heavy load, so I
just used a standard h-bridge chip to drive
them, and left the entire upper unit intact. Don't
have any bandsaws around here.