A 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/17/1114456/toy-armatron-modern-robotics-ai-nostalgia/

45•danso•3d ago

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brudgers•1d ago

https://archive.ph/wAqgu

chillingeffect•4h ago

There was an article in i think Radio Electronics at the time to connect it to a C64.

jim_lawless•3h ago

There was a pretty detailed article in the May 1985 Radio Electronics that mentioned interfacing it to a VIC-20:

https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1985-05/page/n...

Transactor Magazine volume 7, issue 4 (1987 ) had an article on interfacing it to a C64:

https://archive.org/details/transactor-magazines-v7-i04/mode...

Mountain_Skies•2h ago

Hot Coco had an article about hooking it up to the TRS-80 Color Computer.

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/Ho...

>By moving the joystick (a mechanical linkage), you select one of a series of rotating cams that connect a gear to the power shaft. This is probably the worst design possible for modification to electronic control.

At the time I was disappointed that it didn't use (non-existing) motors already in the Armatron but looking back at it with an understanding of the mechanical design, it's easy to see why they went with that decision. The only other choice would have been to connect to the joysticks themselves. The added motors probably improved the operation quite a bit.

chillingeffect•1h ago

Ahhh so it had only motor that got switched in and out mechanically, eh? That must be why it was always whirring even when not moving. I guess small motors were not cheap back then :)

petermcneeley•4h ago

Is my computer hacked or is everyone else seeing a giant subscribe banner on this page?

EncomLab•3h ago

I spent hours playing with mine in the mid 80's! The key takeaway - then and now - is that you can generate an incredible variety of motion with a single motor and a well designed gear-box; no software required!

eterpstra•3h ago

I had this thing and loved it but it WAS SO G$DD$MN LOUD!!!!!

It was like the sound of a pile of silverware dumped into a garbage disposal played at full volume over an AM radio.

Great controls, though.

Mountain_Skies•1h ago

It was made for Radio Shack by Tomy, who made lots of battery operated toys in that era that were very complex and clever amalgamations of plastic parts. My sister had Tomy's 'Dream Dancer', which was obnoxiously loud, though you don't see that in the advertisements. She never got a second set of batteries once the Christmas day set gave out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8ZP1pnP78

manyturtles•58m ago

Yep. Sold in the UK as the Tomy ROBO-1. Had great fun playing with it, never knew people had hooked them up to computers. Echoing others' comments, the drive was noisy even when stationary. And it didn't seem to have any sensors to let it know when it had reached the limit of any particular motion. Instead the plastic gears would start to skip loudly with a usefully intuitive "if you keep doing that I'll break" sound.

gedy•3h ago

I'm impressed Hiroyuki Watanabe was only 24 years old when he invented/led this.

> “I didn’t have a period where I studied engineering professionally. Instead, I enrolled in what Japan would call a technical high school that trains technical engineers, and I actually [entered] the electrical department there,” he told me.

I think this approach is sorely needed again, in the US at least.

petermcneeley•3h ago

The grass was so green back then. Today leaves are brown and there is a patch of snow on the ground.

Swizec•3h ago

I went to a technical high school for software engineering in Slovenia and it was fantastic. We learned C/C++, SQL, relational data modeling, basics of OOP, assembly for microcontrollers, IT administrator stuff, networking/internet, some basics of web development, a little about operating systems.

I did go to study CS after high school (despite getting a job midway through my senior year), but I still draw on the things I learned in high school every day. It was great. Gave me a lot of practical foundations.

hinkley•3h ago

There was a math and science school in my state but it was a boarding school, and that did not seem like a good idea for me.

gopher_space•12m ago

We have technical high schools for all kinds of subjects all over the place. Our community colleges are also doing everything HN thinks they should be doing, and they started like thirty years ago.

siavosh•3h ago

Is there a modern version of this as a toy for a kid?

shove•3h ago

I still have the muscle memory for these controls. I was completely gobsmacked when I disassembled it and saw the concentric rings of gears. Very very cool.

hinkley•3h ago

How does this thing work?

smcameron•2h ago

This video shows the innards of the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMdmkONa7qs

Gracana•1h ago

That is way cooler than I expected.

hinkley•7m ago

Gosh, no wonder it was so loud.

gene-h•3h ago

A similar single motor robot hand has been made that uses electrostatic clutches instead of mechanical clutches[O].

[0]https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08469

irickt•3h ago

Tandy Armatron Dissection http://www.starborneworks.com/?p=22

whartung•3h ago

Friend had one of these. I think he got it from Radio Shack. This was right up their alley.

thedougd•2h ago

Oh man, I completely forgot I had a robot arm as a kid. I had the "Mobile Armatron" variant:

https://www.theoldrobots.com/armatron3.html

victor106•2h ago

Any recommendation on a robotic kit that can be purchased now?

WillAdams•2h ago

Would it be possible to replicate this mechanism using Lego Technic bricks/mechanisms?

kbouck•1h ago

didn't read article due to paywall, but the answer is most likely yes. i was able to build a basic 2-degrees-of-freedom robot-arm grabber using lego technic and power functions and was controlled by scratch on a raspberry pi. lego also has pneumatics.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•1h ago

Somewhat related to this. What would recommend for a young kid 5 and up to get start in today's robotics. The issue today seems more like there is a lot.. which is kinda opposite to what when I was growing up ( if it existed in toy form, it was prohibitively expensive at best ).

dan_linder•57m ago

No personal experience with them, but KiwiCo seems popular to introduce kids to electronics:

https://www.kiwico.com/

firesteelrain•1h ago

Used to play with this. Always wanted one - my best friend had one

fmajid•1h ago

My little brother had one, circa 1985. I don't think the educational content was all that great, compared to our Apple II+.

pryelluw•1h ago

We had one of these and it definitely sparked my long running interest in robotics. Which expanded into small scale robotics manufacturing and then onto 3d printing. I’m now playing with LLMs to discover ways to incorporate into smaller robots. More excited these days about what is to come.

brk•1h ago

I remember saving birthday money and buying this at Radio Shack as a kid. It was pretty advanced for the time. Then I had the idea to try and make it remote controlled, or just fiddle with the internal electronics a bit. Joke was on me, there were no electronics, this thing was 100% mechanical. A single DC motor, and a fuck ton of gears that were engaged/disengaged by manipulating the two joysticks.

This toy probably equally inspired kids to go into robotics, or to design automotive transmissions.

chrisweekly•1h ago

Oh man this takes me back. Armatron and Speak-N-Spell were so great!

stevenjgarner•28m ago

I would put the HERO (Heathkit Educational RObot) in both the same category and the era. [1] HERO came with "an optional arm mechanism and speech synthesizer was produced for the kit form and included in the assembled form". Huge influence on my own life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)

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