Click above image for pictures of Kronos under construction.
From the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia
Cronus (kro´nes) or Kronos, in Greek myth, the youngest TITAN; son of URANUS and GAEA. He led the Titans in a revolt against Uranus and ruled the world. By his sister RHEA, he fathered the great gods-ZEUS, POSEIDON, DEMETER, HERA, HADES, and HESTIA. Fated to be overthrown by one of his children, he tried unsuccessfully to destroy them. Zeus later led the OLYMPIAN gods in defeating him in a battle, described by HESIOD, called the Titanomachy. Cronus is equated with the Roman god SATURN.
My Kronos, however, is named after a old Science Fiction movie about an alien robot the size of a 20 story building sent to earth to steal all the man made energy. Its most distinguishing feature was that it was made of cubes. As it happens my robot is starting to look distinctly cube shaped, hence the name.
I’ve been wanting to build a robot for several years but havn’t had the time, money or resources. But about year ago one of my neighbor threw out an old Power Wheels Corvette. I had seen kids in the neighborhood riding these things, sometimes with 2 or 3 kids on board. So I salvaged the motors, drive train and wheels and started building a robot.
So far Kronos’ frame is about 20 inches square, 8 inches high and built of 1 inch angle aluminum. With the two Power Wheels and one caster he stands an impressive 13 inches tall. He’ll gain additional 14 inches to 16 inches with the addition of a 386SX16 computer.
4/16/97
As you can see I've added some pictures of Kronos under construction. If your looking for a cheap way of adding pictures to your web page you might be interested to know that I took these pictures with a cheap 35mm camera. I then took the film to my local Thrifty/Payless Drug store where they have developing from Konica. For about $11 I got 24 prints and my pictures on a 3.5in floppy. The disk also contains a viewing/printing/conversion program that allowed me to edit them in Microsoft Imager. While the result isn't high quality you can't beat the price.
I have also decided that I don't want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating an interface between the computer and the rest of the robot. I considered using the parallel port but felt it to be somewhat limiting. So I've ordered an I/O board from a company called BSOFT. The board is their DIG100/48 with 48 TTL digital I/O lines and costs only $49 + $8 for shipping. It comes with a manual and some sample programs.
8/21/97
I've installed the I/O board in my computer and built a simple interface board that uses two of the six 8 bit ports. I have an 8 pole dip switch connected to one port and 8 leds connect to the other. I've written a couple of programs for it. One that reads the switch, displays the decimal value on the screen and set the leds to the binary value. The program loops so that the screen and leds are updated when I change the switch. The programs are written in Qbasic.
I am now working on my motor controller board. I hope to have it ready to test in about 3 weeks.
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