Customer Reviews

123 Robotics Experiments for the Evil Genius (TAB Robotics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Great book but I have spent several hours in Radio Shack and a local Electronics supply house searching for the parts needed for the PCB and still have only about half of what I need. I found this site: http://www.hobbyengineering.com/SectionBP.html that has all the parts in a kit form, so I will order from them and see how that works out. Otherwise a fun and informative book so far.

This is a good book, in the sense that it teaches you a variety of topics from basic electronics to intermediate/advanced robotics, including some MCU programming. It does this in a series of experiments (lessons) that you follow thru. However, the book's goal is *not* to teach you how to build a single unique robot, instead, you learn how the different "parts" (circuits or sub-systems) of a robot do work by themselves. So you understand how each piece of the puzzle works, but it's up to you to actually "assemble" the puzzle on to completion.

I found some of the lessons vague, and not all of them include pictures. Without a picture, you must read the descriptions carefully, and just hope you are doing everything right. Many times, the author simply forgets that a picture speaks for a thousand words.

Another con I find is this: for every lesson, you need a parts list. That is, imagine you are only interested in completing 30% of the lessons. You will then have to travel 37 times to The Shack or some online store to get the parts. And no, no catalog part numbers. And worse yet, for many of the lessons you must buy or get hard-to-find parts that will only be used in that particular lesson. I don't find that neither inexpensive or enjoyable.

It is a good book, but I don't think it would be a good choice for beginners. In fact, I am still unsure of its target audience.

The first 2/3rds of this book are more about electronics in general than robotics, but it's a great way to see how all the parts really work and interrelate. It really takes away a lot of the mystery. The author's writing style is geared towards high-schoolers, but at the same time he doesn't dumb it down. As a 40-year old with little electronics background, but lots of computer programming, this was a great relief to me.

Each recipe comes with a full list of parts and tools required, so you can head to RadioShack or wherever knowing you have what you need. Highly recommended.

If you don't know _anything_ about robots and don't know where to start - this is probably the book for you. Mr. Predko starts with a few simple robot models and then goes through materials, basic electronics, semiconductors, timers, digital logic, power, introductory programming, computer interfacing and, finally robot design. When you get through all the experiments, you can comfortably call yourself a "roboticist" and have the knowledge to start creating your own small robots.

This book is VERY dense with a lot of information in it - don't exepct to get through it in a few days. There are literally ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THREE experiments in this book, each one nicely thought out and written and not a lot of work - I've done three now (building the PCB that comes with the book, a 555 PWM and servo driver).

This is definitely the best book out there for people who want to come up with their robots and don't even know what they have to know. Mr. Predko, well done!

JP

First of all I'm puzzled about this book's intent. It begins with trivial kindergarden level constructions but ends with some pretty sophisticated computer programming. In the middle it deals with *very* basic electronics mixed with some fairly advanced stuff.

However, the big problem is the circuit board provided with the book. It is necessary for most of the experiments and vital for the microprocessor work at the end, but finding the parts for it may be quite difficult. The parts list is inadequate and inaccurate. You can't get what you need from The Shack, you'll have to go to an electronics supply house, and even then, you will have trouble finding what you need. (The author did not supply manufacturers or part numbers.) You may end up, as I did, buying a prebuilt board from the microprocessor manufacturer and they aren't cheap!.

It also calls for other parts I had a lot of trouble finding. Some of the transistors are not garden variety in the US and no mention is made of suitable substitutions.

This author has the ability to obscure even the simplest concepts.Perhaps it is intentional, sort of a puzzle book where you have to work so much more (and spend so much more) to get anything done. Calling this book 123 robotics experiments is misleading at best. More than half of the book deals with textbook homework of the dullest kind and generally assumes that the user understands terms or concepts that have not been previously introduced and which only a seasoned engineer would know what they mean.
You will learn, enjoy and save a lot more if you get the BASIC Stamp Discovery Kit which is not only a superb introduction to practical robotics but it also includes all you need to succeed.

I was really excited when I read the table of contents of this book, as I thought it was going to talk about everything I wanted to know. It turned out that it was really boring. I gave it a good try, and forced myself to push through chapter after chapter. I read, but skipped many of the experiments, because they were set up to fail, to show you how something Couldn't be done. For example, one "experiment" on the construction of a robot's frame, was glueing pipe cleaners as joints between 2 tubes of cardboard. It went on to build a whole cardboard tube man, just to show it wouldn't stand up. Needless to say, I'm glad I didn't spend my day constructing that, as I would not have learned much about robotics. I couldn't tell if this was for kids, because it got somewhat complicated. I did buy it in a University bookstore though.

The hardest part of the whole thing, was buying all the parts. Some of them are listed in a way that nobody else lists them, and decoding them took a while. It also, unfortunately, like many robotics books, asks you to spend quite a bit of money on parts. This book pretty much just got so boring, that I began to question if it would actually explain the things that it claimed it would. I ended up giving up on it, and it set me back a bit on my robot experiments, just because I was so bored by it. It also set me back a bit of money for parts.

If you are looking for something to explain things in a fun, understandable, and productive way, look elsewhere.

The book doesn't as much explain how to build a robot as it explains robots by their building blocks; electronics, microcontrollers, sensors, motors etc.

This is both the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness; if you take the time and effort to go through each example, you will gain a solid understanding of electronics; understanding you need to have in order to design and build (as opposed to assemble one from a kit) a robot.

The drawback is that it is time-consuming to go through all the experiments, and it is not always obvious why a given experiment is relevant to robotics. Also, unless you already have drawers full of electronics components and tools, it's going to be quite expensive to buy everything you need -- about $150.

Unfortunately, the author didn't provide a good parts list for the book, so unless you buy a kit with all the components (see link that another reviewer provided), you'll probably need to order parts from several sources.

It is not clear what audience the author is writing for; one chapter may be very basic and simple, while the next is very advanced.

Finally, the book would have benefited from a more thorough proof-reading before going to press; there are some annoying typos and errors in circuit schematics.

It's hard to give an objective review, as I didn't get the PCB Board with this book. I emailed McGraw-Hill, going to see why it didn't have one. If I can't get any help there, I'm going to contact Amazon about this....

Update: I got a response back from McGraw-Hill, these are no longer going to come packed with a PCB board. They said something about a CDRom, but I didn't get one with my book. This is really uncool, as most of the experiments are predicated on having that PCB. So, I would urge anyone who was really considering this to perform the experiments to pass it up. I would not recommend this book to anyone!

AS a 14 year old, I wanted to find a book that could help me learn about robots but I found most of the books too hard or too juvenile. This book starts right off with pipe-cleaner and lego robots and gradually goes up from there. I'm really excited about this book and I'm looking forward to learning how to build my own robots.