Astro by Robert Anderson

    Astro was made about 10 years ago. I slowly add to
    him little at a time. His frame is made from thinwall
tubing. His motor drive was made from window regulator
motors. They were altered with a chain sprocket to make it
a good strong chain drive system. I used a old Tandy
1000 EX mother board for it's controller. I like to use this
type of computer because it has two game sticks and they
are easy to use for addressing in GWBASIC. I use GWBASIC
because I can have everything I need on 1 floppy disk and
do not have to have a hard drive. Maybe some day when
me and Astro get a little smarter we will upgrade my
mother board. I also use the printer port and two SK4514b
IC (4 bit Latch) to give me 32 out controls. I also made
a I/O interface like the one in Radio Electronics (June
1990)to interface my other controls. I made a Speech
Recognition board from Jameco Electronics (Part#141401)which
works very well.I also made a Heath Voice card (Modle HV-200)
for Astos speech that gives him speech. Also from
Jameco I made a Parking Radar Kit (Part#129120)for Astos
sight. I also made a three axes arm I made from GM ac
door position motors. I also installed a strobe light and
sirion from Radio Shack. To monitor my robots wheels I
used 4 magnets installed around one wheel and use a magnetic
switch to count the pulses. Astro cost me around
$500.00 because I had alot of the parts. I enjoy learning and
programming Astro. I am always learning something
new all the time. Right now I am trying to write a GWbasic
program using the strig stick commands. Im tring to
write a program to move my robot around the room and have
it save to file so I can run that file and it will go
around the room just as I had done befor. If any of you
smart people out there can give me some help I would be
so greatfull


Email: robander53@netzero.net