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

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 ...

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

-- Randy M. Dumse

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

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

Travis Wood

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 :).

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.