A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
39 comments
·April 17, 2025EncomLab
I spent hours playing with mine in the mid 80's! The key takeaway - then and now - is that you can generate an incredible variety of motion with a single motor and a well designed gear-box; no software required!
brk
I remember saving birthday money and buying this at Radio Shack as a kid. It was pretty advanced for the time. Then I had the idea to try and make it remote controlled, or just fiddle with the internal electronics a bit. Joke was on me, there were no electronics, this thing was 100% mechanical. A single DC motor, and a fuck ton of gears that were engaged/disengaged by manipulating the two joysticks.
This toy probably equally inspired kids to go into robotics, or to design automotive transmissions.
irickt
Tandy Armatron Dissection http://www.starborneworks.com/?p=22
pryelluw
We had one of these and it definitely sparked my long running interest in robotics. Which expanded into small scale robotics manufacturing and then onto 3d printing. I’m now playing with LLMs to discover ways to incorporate into smaller robots. More excited these days about what is to come.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Somewhat related to this. What would recommend for a young kid 5 and up to get start in today's robotics. The issue today seems more like there is a lot.. which is kinda opposite to what when I was growing up ( if it existed in toy form, it was prohibitively expensive at best ).
dan_linder
No personal experience with them, but KiwiCo seems popular to introduce kids to electronics:
gene-h
A similar single motor robot hand has been made that uses electrostatic clutches instead of mechanical clutches[O].
WillAdams
Would it be possible to replicate this mechanism using Lego Technic bricks/mechanisms?
pvorb
There's an industrial robot arm built out of LEGO Technic bricks by OrangeApps, a small company related to German robot manufacturer KUKA. [1] It's primarily used for educational purposes.
Disclaimer: I work for a subsidiary of KUKA.
kbouck
didn't read article due to paywall, but the answer is most likely yes. i was able to build a basic 2-degrees-of-freedom robot-arm grabber using lego technic and power functions and was controlled by scratch on a raspberry pi. lego also has pneumatics.
firesteelrain
Used to play with this. Always wanted one - my best friend had one
eterpstra
I had this thing and loved it but it WAS SO G$DD$MN LOUD!!!!!
It was like the sound of a pile of silverware dumped into a garbage disposal played at full volume over an AM radio.
Great controls, though.
Mountain_Skies
It was made for Radio Shack by Tomy, who made lots of battery operated toys in that era that were very complex and clever amalgamations of plastic parts. My sister had Tomy's 'Dream Dancer', which was obnoxiously loud, though you don't see that in the advertisements. She never got a second set of batteries once the Christmas day set gave out.
manyturtles
Yep. Sold in the UK as the Tomy ROBO-1. Had great fun playing with it, never knew people had hooked them up to computers. Echoing others' comments, the drive was noisy even when stationary. And it didn't seem to have any sensors to let it know when it had reached the limit of any particular motion. Instead the plastic gears would start to skip loudly with a usefully intuitive "if you keep doing that I'll break" sound.
fmajid
My little brother had one, circa 1985. I don't think the educational content was all that great, compared to our Apple II+.
I would put the HERO (Heathkit Educational RObot) in both the same category and the era. [1] HERO came with "an optional arm mechanism and speech synthesizer was produced for the kit form and included in the assembled form". Huge influence on my own life.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)