I am amazed at the genius of Claude Shannon and I wanted to try and build his 3 drop ball juggling machine. Unfortunately there were no specifications anywhere so I had to just figure it out based and his video. This video shows how I built a working juggling machine. I worked on it for over a year, off and on, shelving it several times and even giving up on it but finally it worked. I was very happy that day.
Yeah, Shannon the engineer/mathematician information theory genius guy. I grew up knowing nothing about him - even though I have a BSCS, never heard about him. Am in awe to say the least.
I knew who he was from his communications theories, but knew nothing about his other activities. When reading your post I thought someone was using his name and posting stuff online. I linked the Wikipedia article, then went and read it. That’s when I found out about his other stuff.
He was definitely a genius.
Thanks for posting this. It is neat by itself, but best of all it enlightened me about Shannon.
That’s great. I am reading the biography, “A Mind At Play” about him. He hobnobbed with all the great scientists in the 40s. They all respected his brilliance too. Kind of an unassuming character, not flashy. Built lots of crazy contrivances. Guess I should try to get through his Mathematical Theory of Communication but doubt I could. I am math illiterate.
Hi @demej00,
Wow, nice work!
Nice to see the earlier versions in your video! The final result is indeed neat!
I was a little surprise not seeing this under the Robots section since it is more of a complete project than a series of tutorials on general notions, etc. Perhaps similar projects would be easier to find under Robots.
You seem to know a lot about Claude Shannon; I invite you to write a blog post about him and his work, if you’d like of course. We sometimes fail to learn about theoreticians, etc. (I plead guilty )
I say this because, reading your post made me think of this series (that was started a while back) called fathers of robotics: https://community.robotshop.com/blog/tag/fathers-of-robotics?page=1
Thank you Mariane. Yes, it was very satisfying to get the juggler machine working after working on it for so long. I put it under something else because I felt it wasn’t much of a robot, just a motor going round and round with no sensors or brains. But next time will put it there.
I’m not much of a writer but will keep in mind an article about Shannon. Am reading a great book about him now so maybe when I finish. Kind of enamored with the guy and feel a common kinship on computers and juggling and building funny machines.
Right now working on a crawling robot using Qlearning which is taking all my attention, other than teaching English classes here at the university.
Thanks again,
Jim
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