Currently got a bunch of things on order, and a nicely full order book. Hurrah.<\/p>\n
Yesterday though I spotted something outside a local charity shop. A Fisher Price ride-on electric car.<\/p>\n
When I was a child, I used to get a book out from the library over and over again. “Build your own working robot” by David L. Heiserman, published 1976 (ISBN 0-8306-6841-1). The hardback, it was bright orange and missing it’s dust cover. I read and re-read it, fascinated by the diagrams that were inexplicable yet tangibly logical. I must have been 8 at the time.
\nI wanted my parents to get me a pair of those electric kids cars just so I could make the robot in it; Buster.
\nAt \u00a3100 each though, that never happened. And one day some git took the book out and never returned it. I was gutted for a long time.<\/p>\n
Last year though, I found a paperback copy on Amazon. And now, for \u00a33 I have the perfect electric car to do it.<\/p>\n
After 21 years<\/b>, I can finally build my own Buster. I have the chance to fulfil a childhood ambition.<\/p>\n
I, of course, will blog it. :)<\/p>\n
The tech involved is pretty crude by modern standards, being started in the mid 70s. I’m sure it’d be easier to redesign it with modern parts. But I’m going to see how closely I can do it to the original book. Wooden PCB racks, reed-switches and all.<\/p>\n
[20\/06\/2010: Amalgamating old posts from “Dreamwidth Creative Blog” into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Currently got a bunch of things on order, and a nicely full order book. Hurrah. Yesterday though I spotted something outside a local charity shop. A Fisher Price ride-on electric car. When I was a child, I used to get a book out from the library over and over again. “Build your own working robot” … Continue reading “Buster: A lucky find”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[103,89],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robots","tag-buster","tag-robots-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sci-fi-fox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}