On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 12:51 PM ben via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> Old relays work better! > Thinking of some sort of robot I read about from 1960's book. Philips publshed a book called 'Practical Robot Circuits, I think in the 1960s. Most of the book described a robot 'dog' that would respond to light and sound, turn to and lick warm food ,and so on. I seem to remember the electronics was based on D-series (1.5V filament) B7G based (7 pin miniature) valves (tubes). In the 1980s a UK magazine called 'Hobby Electronics' published the designs for the HEbot. This had quite simple but ingenious electronics using simple logic chips (4000 CMOS at least in part). Each sensor system had an output to say it was active, these were fed to a priority encoder, the output of which controlled a pair of analogue multiplexers which routed the signal outputs of the highest-priority active sensor to the motor drivers. You can do an awful lot without microcontrollers. -tony
