Jeff's Robotics Page

See my 2020 quarantine project: Raspberry Pi Laser Projector.

Much earlier projects:

My other obsession is robots. I've had great fun with Robotix Motorized Modular Building System. See "jbot3", it uses every single piece that comes with the Robotix R-4000 kit. The jbot3 uses 4 motors and can walk forward and backwards, turn, raise and lower its arm, and pickup objects from the floor. A small trailer tows the control box when not in use. And more photos in the jbot directory.

The first test of my Scott Edwards Mini Serial Servo Controller card were to my laptop and Palm Pilot. I had it controlling two Futaba servos attached to a plastic ruler with paper clip wires in the control horns to act as legs. The "WalkingStick" scoots around just like an insect.

This grew into the QuadraTwist autonomous robot.

My collection of toy electronic robots, especially Tomy remote controlled ones, is growing rapidly. Will post photos soon. For now I have:
    By Tomy: 2 Flipbots, 2 Dingbot2, 3 Verbots (voice controlled), 2 Radio Shack Robie Jr, 4 Tomy Omnibots, 2 Radio Shack Robie Sr
                    1 Omnibot 2000 (his arms are broken and I'm missing the serving tray)
    By Axlon: 2 Petster Deluxe Cats, 1 Petster Penguin, 1 small Petster Cat, Petster Puppy, Petster Gozilla, Petster Hamster, Petster Hairy Spider
    Others:     1 Radio Shack Robie Remote Control, 1 Playtime "Steve the Buttler", 1 Starman 3 1/2 foot inflatable robot, , and one ToyMax RAD 1.0.
                    1 QuickTime Robot Arm (with dual joystick controllers), 1 Radio Shack Armatron, 1 Radio Shack Mobile Armatron

Another fun project was my electromagnetic coil-gun. It can fire BB's about 20 feet with the power of just one AA battery. Several other people have copied this design and reported good results. One even is able to blast a BB through a sheet of paper!

My latest project was a Jacob's Ladder that makes large sparks from a 9,000 volt neon sign transformer. The V shaped rods are about 3' tall and start out with a 1/4" gap at the bottom and are about 5" wide at the top. The spark forms at the bottom then is lifted by the hot air it generates and widens out to several inches before finally giving up and re-forming at the bottom. All the old sci-fi movies had these things sparking away in the back of the mad scientist's lab, so I just had to have one but only recently acquired a large enough transformer.

Also working on a new robot controller based on the Atmel AVR Mega103 microcontroller that I received by attending a seminar.