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The Mythbusters Construct a Kit Bot

Posted by Zonk on Sun Mar 19, 2006 06:15 AM
from the i-am-your-robo-friend-please-remove-packaging dept.
Robotics
A reader wrote in to mention a writeup of a really great Mythbusters project. Hyneman, Savage, and Imahara went out and purchased a 'Vex' robot kit from RadioShack, and constructed the bot to see what it was like. They were pleasantly surprised. From the article: "Jamie Hyneman: I must admit I was expecting to turn up my nose at a do-it yourself robotics kit from Radio Shack. But guess what? The VEX System kicks butt. In a total of about 12 person-hours, Adam Savage and Grant Imahara (my cohosts on MythBusters) and I were able to build a functional, if somewhat basic, prototype equivalent of an iRobot's PackBot."
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  • Radio Shack is going to be selling a ton of them (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cavalierlwt (764097) on Sunday March 19 2006, @06:42AM (#14951552)
    Good break for Radio Shack, you can't pay for that kind of advertising.

  • Person Hours? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Salo2112 (628590) on Sunday March 19 2006, @06:50AM (#14951562)
    They actually said "person hours?"

    • Re:Person Hours? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Secrity (742221) on Sunday March 19 2006, @07:23AM (#14951603)
      In TFA, Jamie Hyneman is said to have used the words "person-hours" in a sentence. The term is totally appropriate and it is not out of character for him from what I have seen on his television program.

      A person hour is a measurement of effort. One person who works for one hour will have performed one person hour worth of work. This measure is often abbreviated as PH. http://www.spc.ca/resources/metrics/glossary.htm [www.spc.ca]

      This information was obtained by reading TFA (I searched for "hours" in the page) and by googling for "define person hours".

      • Re:Person Hours? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Salo2112 (628590) on Sunday March 19 2006, @07:46AM (#14951626)
        Sounds very similar to what we normally refer to as "man hours" when we are not trying to bend over backwards to appease the goddesses of political correctness. ;-)

        man hour [wikipedia.org]

        • Re:Person Hours? (Score:4, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2006, @09:51AM (#14951849)
          Similar, but not identical.

          You gotta figure one man-hour is about equal to two woman-hours. So that means 1 man-hour is approximately 1.5 person-hours. Of course these figures are a very rough sort of average. The actual time it takes to complete a project varies widely depending on which individuals are involved, and it often will not scale in a linear way with number of participants.

        • Sounds very similar to what we normally refer to as "man hours" when we are not trying to bend over backwards to appease the goddesses of political correctness. ;-)

          Yeah, except in this case Kari and Scottie are just way too hot in a tank-girl kinda way to be classed under the category of "man-hours".

          But anything which makes me think of those two in the same sentence as bending over backwards, I've gotta thank you for.

          I, for one welcome our new politically correct tank-girl goddess overlords. =)

          • I love mythbusters too, but if you really think Kari and Scotti are hot, you gotta get out more. They're not ugly, average sure, but far from a "hottie" classification.

            • Re:Person Hours? (Score:5, Insightful)

              by gstoddart (321705) on Sunday March 19 2006, @11:43AM (#14952278) Homepage
              I love mythbusters too, but if you really think Kari and Scotti are hot, you gotta get out more. They're not ugly, average sure, but far from a "hottie" classification.

              Are you kidding me? Kari has that whole Earth-mother, freaky San Fran chick action going on, and Scottie is a tatooed hippy chick who can weld and build stuff.

              Hell, in some of her outfits, Kari looks like a friggin' Anime character, and in a bikini she's amazing -- she's hot like Willow was hot.

              We're talking two protypical geek-girls if I've ever seen 'em. Except they're artists and techicians.

              Are they the protypical fashion hottie? Nope. Does the total package of coolness transcend all of that? Absolutely. They're hot in a counter-culture way that's way better than what Vogue tells us is hot. Like I said, tank girl not fashion model.

              But, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So your mileage may vary.
        • Political correctness is bad enough, political correctness without thinking about it is downright scary. George Carlin said it best:

          "I think mankind ought to be human kind, but they take it too far, they take themselves too seriously, they exaggerate. They want me to call that thing in the street a personhole cover. I think that's taking it a little bit too far. What would you call a lady's man, a person's person? That would make a He-man an It-person. Little kids would be afraid of the boogieperson. They'
    • They actually said "person hours?"
      Of course: it's a more specific term to differentiate from something like "robot-hours" or "woman-hours."
    • I just had to do the accounting of an EC project in PM. That's person month - of course, there's no clear definition anywhere of how many PH there are in one PM.

  • Science fair projects? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by scooter.higher (874622) on Sunday March 19 2006, @06:50AM (#14951565) Journal
    I know my son will love this (OK, me too). He has been asking me to get him a robot kit. But I'll probably have to get two kits so I don't take over his project :-)

    Then robot wars!

    Oh, yeah: I for one welcome our robotic overlords...

    • Re:Science fair projects? (Score:5, Funny)

      by gstoddart (321705) on Sunday March 19 2006, @10:40AM (#14952008) Homepage
      I know my son will love this (OK, me too). He has been asking me to get him a robot kit. But I'll probably have to get two kits so I don't take over his project :-)

      Of course, once you've got two, then you'll need a third so you cannibilize more parts without taking apart his science-fair project. But then he's gonna want another one so he can get a better grade 'cuase little Billy is making a robot too. Then it'll get totally out of hand.

      Then, soon you'll have a houseful of robots doing all manner of silly things. Stop yourself before it's too late, you're playing into their hands and creating our own overlords!

      Run. Run for your lives ... must resist shiny robot mind-control technology ... must resist temptation to go to Radio Shack ...

  • Stairs (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2006, @07:53AM (#14951637)
    Adam Savage: Our goal was to see if we could get it to climb stairs. As far as I know, there are few (if any) toys that will climb stairs; and only a few high-end robots like the PackBot and the humanoid Honda robots that can perform this task.

    I guess climbing downstairs doesn't count? [wikipedia.org] :-)

  • it's FIRST, Radio Shack is the front... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jpellino (202698) on Sunday March 19 2006, @08:01AM (#14951652)
    There was a mini-FIRST made of VEX robots this year. We saw the demo at FRC Hartford last week. Very impressive, makes it more accessible to middle schoolers and they "play" with it less than Mindstorms. The electronics comes from Innovation FIRST, the folks who make the brains for the FIRST robotics teams, and they're also VEXLabs. We're using it for the Trinity College Firefighting Robotics Contest, and we've gotten a chassis built and running under program control and effectors prototyped in record time.

    One thing better than Mindstorms is that you can more easily add other materials, parts etc., and make it more bombproof without resorting to toxic adhesives or plastic-eating tools...

    We're still wondering why RS is having a fire sale - two local stores were cleaned out as of Friday night - we just loaded up the last ultrasound and light sensors we could find. Some have said they're just dropping the retail line at RS, some have said it's just a sale, an eMail to the edu & gov rep at RS Fort Worth is yet unanswered. VEXLabs is still selling at full price. Hope they're just switching horses, but with RS no longer selling electronic parts, this was the sweetest thing they'd had in a while.

    Two heads-ups: the pushbutton inputs use negative logic (thanks, VEX - that was a half hour of "stump the chumps"...) - and there is no "run" switch on the bot - programs (and the wheels they control) run once they complete the download - so either mold some tiny cinder blocks or grab an extra bumper button (or other sensor) and create a latch as the first step in the program...
    • In our rookie year in the FIRST Robotics Competition usfirst.org [usfirst.org] we got a set of this VEX stuff, but it was labeled a llittle differently, as this was before the stuff was released at retail.

      Basically, it's some really useful stuff for fun little project bots, with a lot of components that are very similar to RC parts. It shares a lot of similar traits to the base chassis and components that we use for FIRST, the only differences being that VEX stuff is smaller and less powerful (The main battery we got

    • We're still wondering why RS is having a fire sale - two local stores were cleaned out as of Friday night.

      Probably because the store is closing. Radio Shack is having big problems [allheadlinenews.com]. Profit is down 62% for the quarter, the CEO lied on his resume and was fired, and they're closing 400 to 700 stores.

      Apparently most of Radio Shack's profits come from selling cell phone contracts.

  • Open Source Robotics? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Narphorium (667794) on Sunday March 19 2006, @08:06AM (#14951661)
    Could this be the start of mainstream Open Source robotics? I know this isn't the first DIY robot kit, nor will it be the last but if this really catches on I could see an open source community developing around it.

    Also, I can definately see people developing their own components for these things. Paying $9.99 for a phototransistor is a little ridiculous if you know how to set one up on your own.

      • No, one up from that. He built R2D2.

        No, really. I'm serious. ;)
      • Because Imahara's an electrical engineer with years of experience building remote controlled logic boxes?

        That may have sped things up a bit, but I don't doubt that this kit would allow the average geek to achieve a similar result in a longer timeframe. They're kind of limiting, but kits like this are designed to be fairly easy to set up and program (no assembly language here!). A friend of mine bought a robot kit (admittedly it was mechanically simpler than this) and quickly had a robot capable of navigat

  • I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)

    by carpe_noctem (457178) on Sunday March 19 2006, @08:23AM (#14951673) Homepage Journal
    What myth are they busting here, exactly? That everything from RadioShack sucks?

    • Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What myth are they busting here, exactly?

      You're right and this really doesn't make any sense. Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were put on Earth with the sole purpose of busting myths. God is really going to be pissed when he finds out that they reviewed a product with no myth involved.
    • What myth are they busting here, exactly? That everything from RadioShack sucks?
      Mythbusters (like Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars) before abandonded it's theoretical reason for existing pretty early on and replaced it with a chase after flash, dash, and glam.
  • Back in the day RS had some awesome stuff like the 100 in 1 and 200 in 1 electronics kits. They provided all sorts of experiments that could be built upon. I had em' all.

    Probably why I was able to easily diagnose and repair problems on my TRS-80 Model 1 with EI and disk system. So I'm happy to see them succesfully branch out into robotics. I know they've made some half hearted attempts, like that robotic arm they had on the shelves a number of years ago.

    But I lament the fact that RS stores have slid f
    • RadioShack still has the 100 in 1 and 200 in 1 electronic kits. Usually they're hidden in the back-left of the store near the sound stuff.

      When I worked at RadioShack for a year, I would say that 80% of our customers were those who came in and walked straight back to the electronics drawers and nabbed a few componenets and walked straight up to the cashier to buy them. Admittedly, these were the customers that RS was definitely not trying to sell to (they wouldn't buy cellphones and usually they wouldn't buy

  • I used this for a robotics class at my college... (Score:4, Informative)

    by yellowbkpk (890493) on Sunday March 19 2006, @10:35AM (#14951986)
    My robotics class here at school used a few Vex kits and accessories to build robots. We came out with three cool robots that all were quite successful in 3 weeks. Check out pictures here:

    http://flickr.com/photos/yellowbkpk/tags/vex/ [flickr.com]

    Also, we spent a lot of time making custom sensors and modifying the ones that Vex gave us. They are all very easy to get in to and examine (like this one [flickr.com]) and interface with (like the switch debouncer [flickr.com] that I made). Although the metal parts are just a little "different" then everything else, meaning you have to machine or buy new pieces, some Lego pieces will mesh with the Vex pieces quite nicely (as in this home-made shaft encoder [flickr.com]).
  • I seriously misread that as "The Mythbusters Construct a Kill Bot." I was thinking that maybe Radio Shack was prepared to do anything to restore their former glory...

  • Um, cool -- but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FlyByPC (841016) on Sunday March 19 2006, @11:40AM (#14952267) Homepage
    ...aren't Jamie and Grant already quite knowledgeable about robotics? I mean, Grant has experience in competitive robotics, and Jamie built that soda-can-shooting, remote-controlled vending machine. Not exactly your typical RS customers.
    That said, I am looking forward to seeing them build the kit...
  • The cast of Magnum PI just built a model airplane and didnt even sniff the glue.
  • This is all well and good, but how am I going to afford the alcohol to fuel its power cells?
  • They don't just have the base model kit.
    From what I can tell they have:
    - starter kit
    - Tank tread kit (2X)
    - Ultra sonic ranging sensor
    - Extra hardware kit

    I just bought a vex kit about an hour ago as well, damn cool so far.
  • What plenty of people don't understand is that building a prototype is not the same thing as building a product.

    Some issues that aren't even on MythBuster's radar:
    Making something work as close to 100% of the time as possible.
    Making the system robust to almost all situation.
    Making the system hardened so that dropping it doesn't matter, for example.
    Making it so the marginal cost of product is far lower than the prototyping cost.

    There are hundreds of serious university homegrown robot that can do some great t

    • Sure it is. For further enlightenment, read TFA. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Vex System is no more a robot than a remote controlled model airplane or my car is.

      A remote controlled device is NOT a robot.

      A robot is a mechanical and electronic device that performs a function(s) under its own control. It is capable of making its own decisions.

      An android (NOT "droid") is a robot with the appearance of a human or animal.

      For further enlightment read "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov.

      Did you read TFA? "Also available is a programming module that will allow you to hook your robot up to a comp

    • If you find out more about the VEX kit and don't dismiss it simply as a Radio Shack product, you will see that it is based on a programmable microcontroller. While I think that RS is probably trying get some of the RC market with their product decription, VEX is capable of running autonomously, and thus would fit the definition of a robot.
      • You just can't trust somethign that calls itself "American Heritage"

        Try The Oxford English Dictionary :

        robot /robot/

        noun a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.

        -- DERIVATIVES robotize (also robotise) verb.

        -- ORIGIN from Czech robota 'forced labour'; the term was coined in K. apek's play R.U.R. 'Rossum's Universal Robots' (1920).

        Perform another search of the Compact Oxford Engli [askoxford.com]
        • Sept going by this definition many of the things that the term "robot" was given in the 1920's-1930's or even before the term was even coined would not infact be considered robots, when most scholars do indeed consider them that.

          Thus this definition is far too narrow, especially when even today many of our robots are still human controlled for various reasons. The American Heritage one wins I have to say.

      • From TFA 'Also available is a programming module that will allow you to hook your robot up to a computer and download a program for adding autonomous capabilities.'

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