This September, Parallax has been in business for 35 years. As part of our celebration, we asked our customers to tell us your Parallax story. This is one we received from our community which will be shared throughout the month.
In April 1994, I decided to enter the very first Trinity Home Firefighting Robot Contest in Hartford CT. I live in California, but I was already going to Boston to run the marathon the day after the robot contest, so it all worked out. I had a month to build a programmable robot to run a small maze and extinguish a candle. I had never previously built a robot nor worked with digital logic ICs, so I had a lot to learn. I had built a few circuits and Heathkit projects, and I had used BASIC on a Commodore 64 computer. I considered hacking a Timex Sinclair computer, but I saw an ad in Nuts & Volts magazine for the then-new tiny BASIC Stamp 1 from Parallax, with a whopping 256 BYTES of memory. I ordered the kit, and it arrived shortly. I found it well-documented and easy to work with. My robot began to take shape. It wasn’t pretty but it worked just as I intended. It needed to be fast since overall time was the goal. The BASIC Stamp 1 had just enough memory to handle the dead-reckoning navigation to drive the robot on a fixed path through all four “rooms” of the maze then back to the starting point. Separately, a variety of sensors and digital ICs sensed the candle to initiate “Kill Mode”. The BASIC Stamp paused while the hardware took over, navigating to and blowing out the candle with a fan. Then the BASIC Stamp resumed navigation back to the starting point.
I met some great people at the contest, university professors (even MIT!), robot club presidents, and hobbyists. Everyone was busy tuning their robots onsite, using laptops to reprogram for the actual mazes onsite. Most robots were clearly longtime projects for these people, very sophisticated robots retasked to compete in this contest. Mine was probably the only robot custom-built for this contest, very simple but very fast. Long story short, it won! It operated very consistently over several runs and found and extinguished the candle every time. The BASIC Stamp was a champ and made the whole thing possible.
Over subsequent years, I have used the BASIC Stamp 1 and 2 for a variety of projects. I also used the Stamp to teach programming in several toy design classes I taught at the nearby Otis College of Art. Parallax president Ken Gracey and his sales team reached out and provided BASIC Stamp 2s for each student in the class. This is typical of the generous and outgoing nature of Parallax. I have been active on the Parallax forum for many years, where an active and friendly group of fellow robot builders encourage and challenge each other in lively discussions. My entire Parallax experience has been a pleasure, and I fully credit Parallax —the company, the products, the people, and the forums —for my activities and successes in robotics and electronics for nearly three decades.
Eric Ostendorff
“erco” in the forums
Newspaper story archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210707215939/https:/www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1994-04-18-9404180144-story.html
