🦊 welcome to the vulpe zone 🦊

🔮 adult furry artist and programmer 🔮

be advised some of the posts here might be nsfw! for now most of them will sfw be though.

ive posted a few game titles to itch now! feel free to check em out!
i sure am gonna miss this place
https://foxball.carrd.co/


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

just found out that one of my Core Threads was only ever posted on twitter. a rare occurrance. hell

my parents were gigantic nerds and when i grew up i had A Robot In The House - heathkit's HERO-1, a simple (6800-based?) 8-bit robot with a number of features including a light sensor, ultrasonic rangefinder, an articulated arm, and an incredibly crunchy voice synthesizer. when you turned him on, he would immediately report "REA-DY."

he was fully programmable, and even had a hexadecimal keypad on top! his ROM also contained a number of preloaded routines, including two games: in one, you would try to adjust the light level in the room while he complained "TOO BRIGHT. TOO BRIGHT. TOO DARK." in the other, you'd try to find the right distance from him while he reported "TOO CLOSE. TOO CLOSE. TOO FAR." Good times

but he also included the ROBOT REMOTE.

i had no idea how to program HERO-1, but i did know that he had some level of autonomy of his own - and i also knew that the remote completely overrode it. just by turning it on, you could take Direct Control of all of HERO-1's physical capabilities, drive him around, operate his arm, and program him remotely.

it turns out that HERO-1 was not too far removed from actual industrial robots. they, too, have remote controls, except they're called teaching pendants,

these instruments are incredibly intimidating to look at. they radiate power and seriousness. the design language says "this is not a toy," and indeed, you use these to instruct machines that can tear you completely in two, so, they are not to be fucked with. note the enormous E-stop button; don't forget where that is. it may save your life.

these are unfathomably cool, but what i want to know is how the robot fetishists haven't picked up on them. it boggles the mind. this is perhaps the most powerful symbol of domination i've ever seen. notice how they aren't control pendants or override pendants; they're teaching pendants. they're how you tell the robot the facts of life. this is what you do. this is when you do it. this is where you stop - you never go past this point.

i'm just saying. Draw Your OC


fwankie
@fwankie

I've used one of these! no big e-stop button though, it had a dead man's grip safety thing, hold it too tight or not tight enough and it'd do an e-stop so if you accidentally hit yourself with the arm or get distracted it stops


FoxBall
@FoxBall

i majored in industrial robotics, so i spent a while toying with these pendants. in addition to the e stop, ours had dead man’s switches on the pendant itself. while teaching, the robot would not move unless you squeezed the pendant’s grip hard enough. its tiring for your hand but a very good thing as you invariably startle and let go right before you command the robot to collide with you. it stops instantly. it is extremely cool and equally terrifying to be next to one of these big steel arms, even more so when you’re in control.

programming directly from the pendant is possible, but sucks. we had 2 different models, one from ABB, the other a Mitsubishi. the ABB one was using a custom pascal like language, with a surprisingly ok editor on the pendant, though it was still painfully slow compared to writing the code on a computer and uploading it to the robot, then putting the points in using the pendant.

programming the points in is extremely satisfying, the pendant had a very precise joystick on it that allowed for very accurate movement.

the other one though, had a pendant that looked a bit like the one in the middle in the 4th picture. it was programmed in the worst version of basic i have ever seen. doing that one from the computer wasnt much better as it was a line editor for some reason… inside a graphical program.

i guess i should explain what these points are for.. programming an industrial robot is mainly making it follow a sequence of movement commands, the robot handles the inverse kinematics for you, so all you as the programmer need to do is tell it where in space the end of the arm needs to be, and what style of movement to use: linear, fast, or circular path. beyond that, it’s just a matter of what conditions must be met for it to proceed, ie wait for 4 seconds here, hold a position over somewhere until a signal is received, and so on.. fun stuff, really.

there is one silly thing though, all the robots use stepper motors, and as such can, and do sometimes lose track of where they are unless you zero them. i once had a demo program running overnight, the next day all the example parts it was manipulating were strewn about its cell, and the robot was sitting limp. apparently a power surge had sent them all haywire, as mine was far from the only one in that state.

most of this has just been a trip down memory lane, but im sure there’s a lot of material that could be had from tales like this.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

there is a photo of me as an infant in my dad's house playing with a HERO 1, but i'm told it was just on loan from his workplace. there's another photo of me even smaller with an even more prototypey lookin robot with a bare PCB under a transparent brown bubble dome, but i've never been able to determine what that one may have been. either way, i'm now for the first time mildly troubled by my father's willingness to put me directly in their path and allow me to touch their uncaring robotic heads

as an adult i am regularly defeated by moderate winds, but it's good to know that if they send a robot back in time to eliminate my infant self, i might have a fighting chance