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Saturday, November 25, 2006

 

Ai2 Robot

One of the other things I've been doing is helping MiddleOne build an Ai2 robot. As I write the robots Spirit and Opportunity are trundling around Mars, getting ready to do next seasons science missions. Our little robot is nowhere near as sophisticated as these two, but I feel for the engineers on those missions, after the assembly process for "Snappy".

We collected tokens from the Advertiser for 3 weeks, which involved some trauma on days were were camping, or when tokens went mysteriously missing. Then the assembly instructions. If anyone has read the Issac Asimov story "Insert Tab A in Slot B" then they know how I feel. We weneded my construction the robot sitting at the computer, watching the step by step videos.

Then the LED screen wouldn't work. The helpful suuport people sorted that out, then the motors wouldn't work. The trouble shooting guide helped there. Finally, snappy runs. And spins, and dances and "talks". This is a great little robot, the kids love it, and I am going to have to learn the programming language to write new progrmas for it. Yay!

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