You’re too late ASIMO, Newton (1989) is my personal robot of choice

specs say it all: 20 Megabyte hard disk drive, 720K floppy, 16 bit microcontroller, 2 DC motors, 1 Castor, polyethylene shell… Capabilites: straight line and turning motion, object detection, classroom education, security, home manager?, friend. $7k (~$12k today) according to goretro’s blog. From the theme song: “Bring the future home to you, he’s watching you.” Do we really need human-like robots (like ASIMO) that try to do everything? Task-specific machines seem to do fine for many things, like a dish washer, dryer, or a chess program on a computer. A dish washer would be horribly inefficient if it had to make use of two arms…

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CuriousInventor launched in late 2006 (pre-arduino era!) as a place to enable hobbyists, students, and musicians to create their own technology. We sold open-source kits and tools, and offered numerous guides & videos on things like soldering, metal working, screws, electronics, and more. 

The store is now mostly empty, but we’ve kept the product pages and guides up since they have useful information. Many of our guides and videos still rank on the first page of google searches and have been seen millions of times. Content on this site and the CuriousInventor YouTube channel produced by Scott Driscoll.

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