[home]
[pockets]
[robotics]
[what's new]
[email me]
[links]
[tour]
Handy Cricket
For my birthday, I'm getting a Cricket.
I found the Cricket last year (Autumn 2001) when I was looking for MIT Handyboard links. There was a picture of a prototype driving a very small Lego car. I fell in love: Two motors and two sensors were al I needed for proects like Ria, and the smaller profile looked as if it would make everything more flexible.
I emailed Fred Martin to try and get the password for the schematics, but he told me that he was then in the process of commercialising it. One change of employment later, I finally re-established contact with him and now I've ordered a Cricket. Sue's most important contribution is that I can get it into the house without it being classified as more junk.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a great fan of the Lego Mindstorms system, which comes from the same MIT stable. I'm building a "penny falls" machine, dubbed "Usurer", at the moment, based on an idea in an old Meccano Magazine that I have, and inspired by a recent trip to a local travelling fairground. But Cricket does something different.
I'm going to start with a Cricket version of Ria. Since Sugar was not the world's greatest success, I feel okay calling it Sierra, after the Lartigue monorail operated by the phosphate company of the same name. But here, I can do two versions. I can package a set of small sensors in Lego bricks, and use the same basic Ria design, only smaller.
But, I can also build a set of wooden models in the style of some old drawings of the MotorRail system, which I worked on a few years ago when I was stranded in an hotel somewhere with only a drafting package for company. One advantage of Cricket of the RIS (upon whose head may all blessings...) is that if I really fall in love with one of the projects, as I did with Ria, I can just buy another cricket. Sure, the ruinous international shipping wipes out a host of the advantages, but we may be over in New Hampshire in the autumn, so I can pick up an order there.
If I make a go of the wooden version, I may steel myself to throw away a number of part-completed models. And Sue will be pleased at that.
That's for the moment, though. Cricket, as I said, is more. Crickets can talk and recognise each other. They can exchange information. This is getting back to stuff I did at school and at university, as well as the "nearest neighbour" computing I was doing in the mid 'eighties.
It's probably right that you can't teach old dogs new tricks, But I don't need to learn new tricks. I just need to learn the new names for the old tricks I already know.