The Mythbusters Construct a Kit Bot

A reader wrote in to mention a writeup of a really great Mythbusters project. Hyneman, Savage, and Imahara went out and purchased a 'Vex' robot kit from RadioShack, and constructed the bot to see what it was like. They were pleasantly surprised. From the article: "Jamie Hyneman: I must admit I was expecting to turn up my nose at a do-it yourself robotics kit from Radio Shack. But guess what? The VEX System kicks butt. In a total of about 12 person-hours, Adam Savage and Grant Imahara (my cohosts on MythBusters) and I were able to build a functional, if somewhat basic, prototype equivalent of an iRobot's PackBot."

Comments

Re:Person Hours?

[Salo2112]

Sounds very similar to what we normally refer to as "man hours" when we are not trying to bend over backwards to appease the goddesses of political correctness. ;-)

man hour

Stairs

[Anonymous Coward]

Adam Savage: Our goal was to see if we could get it to climb stairs. As far as I know, there are few (if any) toys that will climb stairs; and only a few high-end robots like the PackBot and the humanoid Honda robots that can perform this task.

I guess climbing downstairs doesn't count? :-)

I don't get it

[carpe_noctem]

What myth are they busting here, exactly? That everything from RadioShack sucks?

Re:Person Hours?

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar, but not identical.

You gotta figure one man-hour is about equal to two woman-hours. So that means 1 man-hour is approximately 1.5 person-hours. Of course these figures are a very rough sort of average. The actual time it takes to complete a project varies widely depending on which individuals are involved, and it often will not scale in a linear way with number of participants.

Re:Science fair projects?

[gstoddart]

I know my son will love this (OK, me too). He has been asking me to get him a robot kit. But I'll probably have to get two kits so I don't take over his project :-)

Of course, once you've got two, then you'll need a third so you cannibilize more parts without taking apart his science-fair project. But then he's gonna want another one so he can get a better grade 'cuase little Billy is making a robot too. Then it'll get totally out of hand.

Then, soon you'll have a houseful of robots doing all manner of silly things. Stop yourself before it's too late, you're playing into their hands and creating our own overlords!

Run. Run for your lives ... must resist shiny robot mind-control technology ... must resist temptation to go to Radio Shack ...

Re:Radio Shack is going to be selling a ton of the

[Hercynium]

Like if we're idiots with the memory span of a goldfish.

Now, now... they busted that one, remember? (the goldfish memory - the jury's still out on the idiots part ;p )

Re:Person Hours?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"she's hot like Willow was hot."

Erm, I'm into midget porn as much as the next guy, but Willow...?