Google Acquires Boston Dynamics

Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by malandrew on Saturday December 14, 2013 @02:46AM (#6905062)

I too would absolutely love to know how you can get involved with robotics as a hobby without spending and arm and a leg (assuming I have access to a workshop equipment like at TechShop or NoiseBridge).

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by moocowduckquack on Saturday December 14, 2013 @12:22PM (#6906258)

Go skip diving for old printers and floppy disc drives and such like. You can get all sorts of useful steppers that way and the floppy drives in particular, if you leave the electronics attached, you can control the stepper directly with a couple of wires from a parallel port which you can trigger using something like parashell http://parashell.sourceforge.net/

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by malandrew on Saturday December 14, 2013 @01:39PM (#6906547)

Any links to tutorials where people show how to repurpose these old steppers?

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by moocowduckquack on Saturday December 14, 2013 @09:24PM (#6908067)

Here's a good start - http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16715/Controlling-Floppy...

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by malandrew on Sunday December 15, 2013 @02:26AM (#6908685)

Merci buckets.

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by moocowduckquack on Sunday December 15, 2013 @02:37AM (#6908701)

The arduino stepper stuff is pretty useful as well -

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Stepper?from=Tutorial.Stepper

http://arduino.cc/en/reference/stepper

http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-16-stepper...

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Re:Google Acquires Boston Dynamics by m_ke on Saturday December 14, 2013 @02:50AM (#6905068)

Get a kinetic, put some wheels on it and then get ROS/PCL running on it.

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