Robots and ukuleles
Techno Talk
It took 120 years from the first balloon flight (1783) to the first airplane
flight (1903). The first artificial Earth satellite came only 54 years later
(1957). Another 12 years saw the first human on the moon (1969).
Then along came the internet, IoT, AI, VR, AR… hold on tight!
R
ecently, I was talking to
someone much younger than
myself. Sad to relate, this age
qualifier now applies to most people
on the planet. I remember when everyone around me was older; now it’s the
other way around! It’s funny how that
works. Even my friends are old (I didn’t
see that coming).
We have three little girls living next
door to us. They believed me when I told
them that one of my chores when I was
their age was chasing dinosaurs out of
our family cabbage patch. That was obviously a joke – my family never even
owned a cabbage patch.
All this set me to thinking about how
much technology has changed since I
was a lad (cue ‘travelling back in time’
visual and sound effects…).
Magic Robots
I was born in 1957. I bet you’re saying,
“Wow! That’s ages ago!” It is. That’s
why it has taken me so long to get from
then to now.
One way to think about it is that I
was born only 12 years after the end
of World War II (even back then everything had to have a sequel). My mother
was born nine years before the start,
and my dad was born in the middle of
World War I, also known as the Great
War, although I can’t figure out what
was so great about it.
Kids’ toys these days would have been
the stuff of dreams when I was a nipper.
When I was about eight years old, my parents gave me a toy called The Amazing
Magic Robot. The game was presented
in a large flat rectangular box, with the
cover showing an iconic image of three
clean, shiny, well-dressed, beaming kids
staring at the robot.
When you removed the lid, you found
the ‘robot’ mounted in the center. Itwas
plastic, around three inches (75mm) tall,
and holding a pointer. A paper sheet
spanning the box had a circle of questions
surrounding a hole with a small notch
on the left. There was a corresponding
circle of answers surrounding a smooth
area on the right.
The game came with multiple doublesided sheets of questions and answers.
You applied the sheet of interest, placed
Practical Electronics | November | 2024
the robot in the hole on the left (a tab
on its base complemented the notch in
the side of the hole) and you rotated the
robot to point at one of the questions.
When you subsequently transferred
the robot into the circle on the right, it
magically spun around to point to the
correct answer all by itself!
Of course, I now know that this was
achieved using magnets, but it was as
close to magic as you could get back in
the day.
A few years ago, a member of the PE
community completely unexpectedly
sent me an original 1960s version of
this awesome antique. It arrived out of
the blue and I have it prominently presented in my office.
The computerised toys of today are
so much more advanced than those of
my youth, and the kids who play with
them are so much more knowledgeable
than my chums and I ever were. Now
I’m wondering what the little girls next
door would think about my Amazing
Magic Robot. I’ll have to bring it home
to show them and see their reactions.
There’s an app for that!
If you look around, you invariably see
young people engaged with their smart
phones. Many of them are texting each
other, but a large number are interfacing with apps of one form or another.
Currently, around two million apps
are available in Apple’s store. That’s a
lot of apps!
I’m not immune myself. In addition
to a handy-dandy compass app, which
would be very useful in the woods (if I
ever went there) and a clinometer app,
which would be very useful when attaching shelves to a wall (if I ever wished to
do so). I have apps for all seasons, from
helping me to locate my car to generating sequences of random numbers.
Since a modern smartphone is a very
powerful portable computer, it makes
sense to use it for a wide variety of tasks.
A few years ago, for reasons I no longer
recall, I decided to build a ukulele, as
one does. Once you have a ukulele in
your hands, you need to tune it.
Originally, I was planning on visiting a
local music store to see if they sell such
a thing as an electronic ukulele tuner
Max the Magnificent
(they do), but then I thought, “I wonder
if there’s an app for that?” As you’ll see
if you search the app store, the real trick
is deciding which of the myriad ukulele
tuner apps to use.
Which way is the wind blowing?
When I was a kid, adults were very
good at predicting the weather, especially
during or after it happened. Whenever I
was walking to the shops with my mum
and we bumped into people she knew,
one of the main topics of conversation
was the weather that day, how it compared to the past 50 years and what we
might expect for the next decade or so.
In the early 1960s, there were only
two channels on television (BBC and
ITV) and they were only on for a small
part of the day. The weather forecasts
in those days were little more than educated guesses.
Things got better over time, but not
much. I still remember watching the forecast on the 15th of October 1987, when
BBC weatherman Michael Fish told us
that a woman had called in saying she’d
heard a hurricane was on the way and
his message to her was, “don’t worry,
there isn’t”. A few hours later, the worst
storm in 300 years killed 19 people and
flattened 15 million trees.
I currently live in Huntsville, Alabama,
USA. We have three local television stations and goodness only knows how
many Doppler radars. In the event of a
storm, we turn to any of these channels
to be presented with a blow-by-blow account (pun possibly intended) of what’s
happening.
Accompanied by high-resolution imagery and awesome graphics, the presenter
literally says things like, “The maximum winds will be crossing County
Line Road at 10:21, and you can expect
them in Harvest three minutes later at
10:24, then in…”
Hold onto your hat
The pace of technological development is increasing exponentially. The
more I think about what’s come before,
the more I realise I have no clue what
is to come. I can’t wait to see what technologies we will have when I celebrate
PE
my 100th birthday in 33 years!
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