August 3rd, 2020 § Comments Off on Ready… § permalink
I’m always a little scared of applying power to a device after working on it. After flipping the antique switch, I was greeted by the classic 80’s synthetic voice saying “Ready”. It was glorious.
Fixes
Before powering up the Hero 1, I reviewed the wiring top to bottom. As this was a teaching robot, there were certainly some jenky wiring. Additionally, the fuse blocks were open blocks – seems a bit dangerous to me.
Once booted, I was also able to drive it around! (I’ll get video later).
Upgrades!
Now that I have the Hero 1 Robot driving and talking, it’s time to think about upgrades required to interface it with a modern CPU. (I did say I was going to ROS enable it right?)
In order to have a modern CPU communicate with the robot, I need a modern serial interface. Turns out the Robot Workshop offers a USB Serial bridge for the Hero 1!
It requires a memory upgrade and a late version ROM, so I picked those up as well.
Retr0bright
The Panels of the Hero 1 suffer from the classic yellowing of old plastic. I’m going to see if Retr0bright will help (or hurt). What’s Retr0bright? It’s a chemical process that was developed (or was it discovered) by the console restoration community. If it works on consoles, it should work on robots… I’ll report back.
July 12th, 2020 § Comments Off on 35 year old ROS Robot? § permalink
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.
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…
July 8th, 2020 § Comments Off on HERO 1 & ROS? § permalink
When I was young – early ’80s – I was in the boy scouts. During one of our events, one of the parents introduced us to a Heathkit Hero 1. It was the first time I realized Robots were real.
I found a complete Hero 1 robot on eBay, and had to have it! It has sat on a a shelf for over a year now. I was recently inspired by a restoration video to fix it up.
Through the grapevine, I was introduced to a Robotics historian, who has a cache of components – and upgrades!
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be doing a teardown, cleanup and rebuild… I’ll post progress shots. Maybe even do videos…
If you are reading this – cool. It’s been forever since I posted.
I work professionally with the Robot Operating System – ROS…. Once it is up and running – maybe I’ll ROS enable it.
Because.
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