These little guys predate the Arduino era. Atmel was the new kid on the block when these were made. Check out those stylish external crystals that were necessary on those early AVR's. ;) IR diodes and transistors on the red one. Sunlight completely washed out the IR signal, so that approach was abandoned. The whisker switches on the other worked fairly well. My first attempt at biomimicry. They had no real behaviors to speak of other than to bump into something, stop, reverse, turn the wheels and go again.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/radio-shack-zipzaps-robots
lol, ya…
that looks really old, would love to see videos and more pictures.
Thanks MetalmonkeeLad,I am
Thanks MetalmonkeeLad,
I am afraid that the tiny rechargeable nicad batteries in these gave up years ago.
If letsmakerobots had an antique robot section, I would have posted them there. The chips are long obsoleted by Atmel.
The lessons learned about the sensors are still valid!
The jscottb blog post about the mBuino got me looking at the mbed.org site again.
I have a more modern robot that is due for a CPU upgrade and an ARM Cortex board from STMicroelectronics in 32 bit glory with floating point processor is included on the mbed.org supported devices list. I’ll remember to take notes for a writeup this time.
