After having re-watched a program on the NASA Mars rovers, I began thinking back on my own adventures in robotics, and thought I might share a story.
When I was about 9 or 10, I decided I was going to make a robot. This was in the early days of my education in electricity, and, well… I went the hard route. The robot itself consisted of an old Avon cardboard box that was about 25cm by 40cm, and about 15cm tall. Not that big of a box, but a decent size for my robot. I started by installing an axle through the center of the robot, and attaching some wheels to the axle. To balance it, I crafted a head that consisted of a caster sticking out of the front with another cardboard box head. It was fairly fancy for a 10 year old.
At this point, I noted I had a flaw, namely, my robot needed some form of locomotion. Around this time, thanks in large part to a visit from my aunt, I had spent a lot of time going to garage sales, and I had acquired a collection of electrical gadgets. I installed some lights in the head, and cut a hole out the back and installed a ionizer fan sticking straight out… you know, like some kind of jet turbine. Not that it worked to move the robot, but I could plug each thing into the wall and look at the blinking lights.
I realized with a start that I needed a control panel. So, I snagged yet another cardboard box, and some heavy duty toggle switches. Each electrical cord ran out of the robot, was cut, and spliced through a toggle, and then off to a wall outlet. As a result, I had about 4 electrical plugs coming out of my cardboard control panel. I had not realized I could just have one and wire them in parallel yet. So, I had to choose which 2 devices I wanted to run at any given time, or find a power strip.
Now comes the fun part. I was out in the garage, and had one wire left, the one for the fan. I grabbed my cutting dikes and clipped the wire. There was a bright flash and an exploding noise, and the lights went off. I looked at the cutting surface of the dikes and discovered a large crater where the wire had been. I suddenly learned a lesson: always unplug the cord before cutting.
Now I had a problem. My folks had no idea I was playing with electricity at this point. The breaker panel for the garage was in the locked workshop part that I had no access to. I had to come up with a plan. I spent hours trying to break in, and failed. My dad found out the power was out, and I claimed that I was not involved. That worked pretty OK, until he found the dikes. Ooops.
Needless to say, my first robot disappeared shortly after that. Poor robot, I hardly knew you. I was given a stern lecture about messing with wall outlets, which kept me from messing with them for about, oh… a week maybe.
These days I get shocked a lot less (gah, high voltage DC hurts the worst), but I still strive to blow something up often. Compare and contrast this story with my wind sail experiment where I gave lots of thought to locomotion but none to control systems.
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