Hi Dave,

This is a great idea to start a thread on it! Even if it isn't considered for a show, the information could be useful to anyone who wants to recreate something similar.

Here is some basic information on it, I've had to re-type in my own words, since I didn't want to publish a photo of the entire article since it is copyrighted.

HERO 1 Basic Information

(Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hero1.jpg  (license CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dimensions:

Around 500mm high

Hardware:

14 PCBs!

1 PM DC motor

7 stepper motors

Base:

Contains motor drive and steering, and three of the four total batteries.

The batteries are 6V, but in series to make 12V. So there is a 12V supply for the motors, and a 12V supply for the electronics.

Body:

Most of the PCBs fit here around the body. There is a door for the wiring looms.

Head:

Rotates almost 360 degrees. There are a variety of sensors on it including movement (ultrasound), light, sound and distance (using ultrasound). There is also the fourth battery here.

The top of the head has a proto-board area, LED display, and hex keyboard. The proto-board allows access to GPIO, supply lines and so on, for connections into the CPU of the robot.

Arm:

This is attached to the rotating head and can therefore rotate close to 360 degrees. The arm moves up and down 150 degrees. It is possible for the arm to expand by about 120mm.

The gripper can bend by +-90 degrees from the arm. It can rotate about the arm axis by close to 360 degrees. The max opening is about 85mm.

Electronics:

There is an RTC, and a speech synth. The processor is 6808, 8k ROM (expandable up to 16k total), 4k RAM.

Software:

The keypad has an 'Abort' button which won't quit the program, but will halt the robot and display the program counter value. It can be resumed.

The keypad is hexadecimal because HERO is programmed in machine code instructions. As far as I understand, it is possible to jump to a interpreter which will handle simplified instructions for doing tasks like moving the arm, and then you can jump back into the machine code. This means you don't have to do everything in machine code if you don't want to.

There are in-built utilities that can be run from the keypad, to perform tasks like move the head and arm to a set position, setting the time, load programs, save programs, etc. (Load and save uses a tape player/recorder).

Teaching Pendant:

This has a rotary switch which can be used to select Head, Arm, Gripper etc., and also left/right push-buttons and a go finger-trigger button. So, you can select a part of the robot using the rotary switch, and then move that part using the left/right push-buttons or the go trigger. As a result it is possible to move the robot (at three different speeds) forward or backwards, make it turn, and control its head, arm, gripper and so on. The pendant is used for either manual control, or for the learn mode, i.e. the robot remembers how long you press the finger-trigger and records all the settings.

It has been a long time but I remember the class having a lot of fun as we built two of these kits and learnt to program it.

Faiz Ishaq

It has been a long time but I remember the class having a lot of fun as we built two of these kits and learnt to program it.

Faiz Ishaq