If your school in the 1980s was lucky enough to have a well-equipped computer lab, the chances are that alongside the 8-bit machines you might have found a little two-wheeled robot. These machines and the Logo programming language that allowed them to draw simple vector graphics were a popular teaching tool at the time. They’re long-forgotten now, but not in the workshop of [Niklas Roy], who has created a modern-day take on their trundling.
His two-wheeled robots form simple but effective vector plotters, calculating the paths between coordinates with a consistency that surprised him. They’re used for artwork rather than functional plotting, but we’re guessing they could be used for either. We particularly like the drawing battle between a pair of drawing bots and an eraser bot, as it reminds us of a pixelflood screen.
The parts are all straightforward, its brain is an Arduino Nano, and the files can be downloaded for you to build your own. If you’re falling down the Logo rabbit hole as he did, then it’s not the first time we’ve been there.
Not long-forgotten.
Imagine the battle beteween “line-folowers” and tese “line-casters”
Fond memories of Logo and turtles and Koala Pads!
My primary school had the computers (Microbee) and the turtle LoGo software, but no turtle robot.
I was at UMass Amherst in the 70s. We had mainframe LOGO on our CDC mainframe. The Wikipedia page says LOGO became widespread in the 1980s and the first school users were in 1968-69. Developed at BBN in Cambridge, MA, so I suspect that the School of Ed at UMass got it for use at their lab primary school.
Side note: Bill Cosby was a PhD candidate at UMass while I was there. Never saw him, but the Fat Albert cartoon series wasrumored to be part of his PhD work.
Ok, I may have played C&C RA2 a bit much at a formative age.
Part of me wants to build them with steerable receiving prisms on top. Then stage a laser arrays that feeds a beam combiners in the corners of the room with steerable mirrors to keep track of the bots. A computer would coordinate the mirrors on the beam combiner with the receiving prisms on the bots.
Voila!
An overly complex, low resolution, “scalable”, laser etcher/plotter.
I want to see it!