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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! 51