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Techs began as a classroom project back in my adult education days. He was originally intended to demonstrate computer programming concepts for the beginning programmer. When the company I was working for at the time went belly up I was left with a really cool looking robot and I have been trying to find a use for him ever since. I sometimes put a lamp in his hand and tell people that he is an automatic lamp that changes its own bulbs. A suprising number of them actually believe me.
He is made almost entirely from junk parts including old copper tubing, scrap lumber, used wiring, surplus motors, and a few cheapie Radio Shack items. His arms and hands are pneumatic and everything else is electric. His power supply is an old 12 volt battery charger.
He interfaces to the computer through the parallel printer port using a minimum of electronics, a few LEDs, 8 transistors, and some opto-isolators. Output is from the 8 data lines and input is thru the handshake lines.Anyone with even the least little bit of electronics knowledge can pretty much duplicate him with ease.
Well, maybe not duplicate exactly, because there are no blueprints. In fact I made him up as I went along.
In any case I havent worked on him much lately because I got married again and no longer need a distraction and my wife and I have both started college. A few months ago my new stepson (Jonathan, the J in jbtseti, I am Bob my wife is Terrie)suggested looking for ET and that also got us started on our main hobby,SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence.Lets just say that I have been ignoring Techs a lot.If I get back to him one day I will post my progress here, in the mean time if anyone is interested in more information about him I would be very pleased to here from you .Feel free to email me.