DIY Robotics and Sensors
DIY Robotics and Sensors on the Commodore Computer: practical projects for control application by John Billingsley. Published 1984 by Sunshine Books (an imprint of Scot Press Ltd), London, ISBN 0 946408 30 0. 141 pages. The scan is from the retro-commodore.eu archive (Tomse), processed with ABBYY, and carries a searchable text layer.
This is the one book in this wiki's Commodore collection that is genuinely about electronics hardware — but it is about circuits you build, not about repairing a Commodore machine.
Contents
| Chapter | Page | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Getting Started — basic equipment, construction methods, a simple power supply |
| 2 | 7 | Signal Inputs — the analogue port, control-knob inputs, a simple joystick, a light-pen |
| 3 | 19 | Graphic Design with a Joystick |
| 4 | 33 | Logic In and Out — what's what on the user port, address decoding, data direction registers, a random mains light switch |
| 5 | 43 | Analogue Input for the PET and 64 — encoding a joystick on the user port, and a circuit for more precise analogue input |
| 6 | 55 | Stepper Motors and Their Use — a tutorial motor and a drive circuit |
| 7 | 69 | A Simple Turtle |
| 8 | 81 | Interfacing a Robot — robot language, teach mode, six-axis control circuit |
| 9 | 99 | Analogue Output and Position Servos — feedback and stability, analogue output from CB2 (PET only), interrupts, radio-control servos |
| 10 | 115 | Simple Robot Vision |
| 11 | 123 | Whatever Next? |
What it is good for, and what it is not
Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 9 document the Commodore user port and analogue port from the outside — signal levels, data direction registers, address decoding and the CB2 output on the PET. That is real, checkable interfacing information and it is the reason to keep the book.
It is not a repair source. There is no schematic of any Commodore machine in it, no parts list, no component values for any Commodore board and no fault-finding procedure. Its circuits are the author's own designs for things to plug in, not the machine's own circuits.
One piece of bench advice in it has aged well and one has not. The soldering guidance in chapter 1 — tin both wires separately, never carry molten solder on the iron because the crust disguises a dry joint — is sound. The recommendation to buy a moving-coil multimeter rather than a digital one was reasonable in 1984 for watching a signal swing; see Recommended Tools for what a modern bench actually needs.
Related pages
Download DIY Robotics and Sensors here: SunshineBooks_DIY_Robotics_and_Sensors.pdf (13 MB)