Robots.
They're a thing aren't they.
Strangely though, they seem to be less of a thing now, than they were a few decades
back.
From right back to the start of the 20th century, through to the 80s, real robots, that could
do anything for us, seemed to be tantalisingly close.
But yet, the reality, has still yet to meet the hype, the fiction and the hope of these
marvellous creations.
Btu the awe of robots still remains in our minds, especially my mind.
That electric thrill of the 80s still feels ever close, and as ever exciting as it did
then.
That's why devices like the SVI-2000 Robot Arm stick in my mind.
Look at that 80s tron like box art, it's incredible.
Now, this thing was manufactured in 1985 by Spectravideo International (formerly known
as SpectraVision) under their QuickShot brand, and was designed to drill right into the core
of those fascinated with the rapid pace of robot technology.
In the 80s, it seemed anything was and could be possible, so getting your own robotic device
was almost essential.
Obviously high price tags however, meant that few of us experienced these whirring delights,
and with Spectravideo going out of business in 1988, those who had spent years saving
up for one, were left disappointed.
But check out these guys on the box, they're not disappointed.
I have no idea why they're wearing construction hats, but they're loving it never the less.
We're shown the 5 degrees of robotic movement offered by the arm here, along with some examples
on the side, details of attachments, an overview of how to control this industrial looking
beast, and various other 80s looking artwork, including some of their other products such
as the Parabolic ear and voice changer.
All robot related, designed to alter or enhance the human condition.
My Robot Arm cost about £70, and was shipped to me from Germany, where far greater numbers
of these were seemingly sold than anywhere else, but then Germany is renowned for its
engineering, so you might expect that.
The Robot Arm itself is firmly wedged inside this polystyrene cocoon, I just need to re-attach
this plastic support and there she stands.
There are a few other bits in the box, such as suction feet for stability, and various
adaptors for the arm itself.
Look at this thing, it looks like it has just been removed from a car manufacturing plant,
or the factory from The Terminator where our friendly T800 meets its demise.
I love it.
Its just so very 80s.
We'll need 4 D cells to power this thing, and then for control purposes we have a couple
of options.
One involves hooking it up to an 8 bit home micro and programming it, the other is just
by plugging 2 standard joysticks into the ports provided.
You could buy the Robotarm, bundled with two Quickshot 1 Joysticks for this purpose, or
you can just provide your own.
Any standard ones will do.
Here I've got a Quickshot 1 and a Wico Boss to orchestrate movements, and for now Octav1us
Kitten will be taking control.
Suffice to say, she was very exicted.
But then, this is a FRICKIN' ROBOT ARM, so that's understandable.
Now to start with, this particular device had some issues with its forward and backward
movement.
The arm could go up and down, swivel left to right, rotate the hand and even operate
its pincers - which incidentally, and cunningly, accounts for the 5th degree of movement advertised.
But it was unable to operate the lower motor.
A quick disassemble, and wangle of the screwdriver to realign and loosen some tight screws did
however seem to fix things, and so we're good to go.
Interestingly though you can see how simple this arm actually is, we've just got a few
DC motors, connected to some plastic gears.
They're not the most powerful, so the whole device is quite slow and lacking in power,
but it's still bloody cool.
Fully armed, the arm can be controlled left to right, by moving joystick one left and
right, and forward and back by pushing up and down.
The second joystick controls the robots forearm movement and what I'll call the wrist movement.
Each trigger on the joystick in then used to either open or close the jaw, on the 5th
axis.
We also get a handy spot light during this process in case of working in low light conditions.
It's pretty dark and gritty in the 80s robot world, after all.
So, we need a project, and what's better than trying to make a cup of tea.
After all, it is an art, Octav1us is an artist of sorts, and for this endeavour, the Robot
Arm shall be her medium.
To begin, we'll need some sugar, and a scoop attachment.
Let's see if we can get a teaspoon in
the cup.
Well, that kinda worked.
Next up, we'll need a tea bag.
Now ideally we would have used the pincers to pick up the bag, but this Robot Arm only
came with one pincer, so we made do, and it kinda worked.
Next up, is the water.
This time I thought I'd have a dabble.
This is really harder than it looks.
Anyway after a few attempts, we had a little bit of water - I might have accidentally tipped
a bit more in the cup if I'm brutally honest, as the thought of scolding water flicking
into Octav1us' eye was causing slight concern.
How about the milk?
Well, that's easy enough.
You'll note we have the magnet attachment on now as well, and that's mainly for stirring.
It's not really strong enough to pick up the spoon, but, that looks stirred enough to me.
Time to try a cup of freshly brewed robot tea.
Mmmmmmmmm.
That's the ticket.
OK, so we've seen this thing under human control, but how about plugging it into to your standard
Commodore 64.
Well, there were attachments for various computers available at the time.
This huge MSX device seems to have been the most abundant, but thankfully Tim Harris of
Shareware Plus is making adaptors today for the C64.
He was kind enough to send me one, so we can get down to some serious business...
We're going to need the lights down low.
So, here's the Datel Robot interface, as you can see, we have two 9 pin joystick leads
trailing out, and these of course, plug into the ports on the Robot Arm.
We also have the Robot 2000 Software, and some instructions, in German.
Which are clearly of no help to me.
To activate this system of madness, the interface plugs into the Commodore's cartridge port,
the disk goes in the drive, and we're ready to go.
Oh, I'd better change the batteries first, zinc-carbons don't last long here.
Remember kids, being a cheap-skate doesn't pay.
Rather than a purely command line interface, which many users would have experienced in
the 80s, using the ROGO programming language - which is actually a lot like LOGO, we actually
have a startup screen for Robot-2000 by Vectorsoft and an actual menu driven interface, which
is nice.
I'll just have a sip of tea and acquaint myself with the manual, before we get stuck in.
Pfffffffffft.
Oh god, I need a new cup of tea.
OK, so this time I'm using a joystick to navigate this GUI, and the interface should do the
rest.
It's taken me a little while to aquaint myself with what's going on here, but essentially
we can use this screen to move the Arm.
Check.
It.
Out.
Using a Robot arm through a Commodore 64.
Each of these buttons obviously relates to a different action on the arm, and if you
know German, you know what they do as well.
After working out what's what, I'm now ready to create my first program, and it's incredibly
easy.
All I need to do is select the Programming menu option, and Record my program, much like
you would with a Macro on a Wordprocessor or Spreadsheet for example.
Now, although I can't get the Arm to wash that filthy tea from my mug, I can at least
try and get it to pick up this sponge.
So first I'll do it manually, whilst recording the actions, then save those actions to disk.
The program will then reset the arm to the position it started it, and hopefully, if
I place the sponge where it was before and run the program, it'll repeat the same actions....
unfortunately... it seems to fall a little short each time.
But that's ok, given this arm is some 33 years old, I think we can forgive its accuracy.
Especially as there are definitely some misaligned cogs going on in the swivel axis.
Of course, aside for that, the downside of this program is that we can't drive several
axis joints in unison, like we could by hand; not that I could see anyway.
So this program is great for running commands on the fly.
Perhaps you can get your arm to repeat mundane tasks, or get it to scratch your back, but
what if you wanted to create something more complex.
Well, using BASIC, we can simply use POKE commands to talk to the interface and activate
the arm.
With this the world is your oyster.
If we paired the robot arm with other sensors, perhaps that heat sensor I made last year,
we could create all sorts of wonder and intrigue, from an automatic waving device to a fully
automated teas maid.
I can picture it now...
But given I can't be bothered to create that much code, I'm just going to type out a few
lines of this example program, which simply relays a command following a key-press.
Marvelous stuff
So, that's the Quickshot SV-2000 Robot Arm from Spectravision.
It's an amazing piece of 1980s robotica.
Maybe it's not the robot we all dreamt of back then, but it's close enough and it's
a shame we didn't see a bigger line of these products spanning into the 90s.
In fact it's a shame we haven't got more products like this today.
Even so, I would have absolutely loved to have one of these back then.
Thinking up experiments, tests, different brews for it to make.
But as it stands now, I'll probably just leave it on a shelf to marvel at.
It's a fun piece of kit, but until I can think of a task where it'll be useful, then it's
only going to come out when Octav1us is back in town, and wants to make a rank cup
of tea.
Thanks for watching.