For Building DIY Droids, It Helps to Live In Japan 38
destinyland writes "Want to build a robot this summer? 'Robot-loving Japanese are tinkering with screwdrivers and motors instead of heading to the beach,' and this article identifies the stores and sites serving robot hobbyists. Several sites are actually selling leftover industrial robots, but there's a variety of smaller-size robot vendors, from Tokyo's Vstone Robot Center to Carl's Electronics in Oakland (which sells sound-activated 'Hydradzoids' and solar-powered robots that crawl). Hasbro even sells their own functioning R2-D2 droid with real sonar navigation and a 'voice recognition response module.'"
In the US ... (Score:3, Insightful)
What are the chances that if you opened up a such a store in the US, you would have homeland security checking out your credentials?
Re:What's really going on in Japan hobbyist roboti (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah but as you make it smaller, you need smaller, faster, more accurate accelerometers, actuators, etc. to keep it working. Gets expensive to scale something like that down.
Waiting (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll be more excited when we finally come up with a good long lasting power supply and better software for running them.
Those two things are holding most of our robotics back.