35 year old ROS Robot?

July 12th, 2020 Comments Off on 35 year old ROS Robot?

Meet Marty. Marty is a HeathKit ET-18 Educational HERO 1. ROS – the Robot Operating System – is an open source “system” for operating Robots. Can I ROS enable a 35 year old Robot?

(Full disclosure – I’m a Development Lead at Microsoft in the Edge Robotics team – working on ROS within the Core Operating Systems group. This project is not endorsed by or funded by Microsoft)

ROS enforces a “separation of concerns” – Sensors, Compute and Actuators are separated from each other using a “pub/sub” messaging model.

The HERO 1 uses a Motorola 6808 Microprocessor with 4kb of RAM. This obviously won’t run ROS or a modern operating system; but is it enough to run the motors and sensors?

Let’s Try it!

But first, I need to get it up and running.

Marty was built in October 1984 – when I was 9 years old. Marty will be cheaper to restore than a Delorean…
Are those Eyes or Ears?
Something missing…
Check out this wheel encoder!
I think this is the end stop
Hmmm… I’m sure that shouldn’t be like this…
Safety Third – That’s some good macgyvering there.
I’m pretty sure they aren’t supposed to be this way…
1980s Ground Bar…
Yes, the wire is jammed into test points to change modes…
This looks aftermarket. Good plan…

For a 35 year old Education robot, I think it is in relatively good shape. I’ve ordered manuals and some upgrades – including a USB interface…

My plan:

  • Clean all the contacts
  • Fixup some of the solder blobs
  • The open fuses scare me. I’m going to replace them with closed fuses…
  • I’ll do subsystem bringup, then work on the Arm…

Until Next time….

Tagged , ,

Comments are closed.

What's this?

You are currently reading 35 year old ROS Robot? at OoeyGUI.

meta