"passerby" wrote in message
ups.com...

replying to RogerN , passerby wrote:
snip

I have never met an employer who would not want to hire a tech who's ready
to go right now, on any equipment they put in front of him. Most of the
time they're not ready to pay the wages such person would require, so
usually a compromise is found somewhere in between. You have to
demonstrate that you are "teachable", and having some experience with
small robots might help.
(Disclaimer: robots are a hobby for me, I never needed to bring my
robotics lab up in an interview. But I do have a lab with the equipment
that I do work with professionally and it does help to get the
conversation going)
--
posted from
http://www.polytechforum.com/metalwo...ts-580710-.htm

A Scorbot III with controller came up on eBay with a reasonable "Buy it now"
so I bought it. The robot should be on the way soon, I have a tracking
number but no tracking information yet. I tried out the software in a
laptop with Windows XP, it seems to run fine. I found a serial port monitor
program that lets me know the communications on the serial port so I hope to
reverse engineer the PC commands to the controller. My idea is to be able
to write programs and run them on the PC, the PC would then send move
commands to the Scorbot, read I/O, etc. So the program would actually be
running in the PC, allowing for very large programs, image processing, and
so forth. If this works out, I can try to find information on ABB and Fanuc
programming and write a program to execute files written for different makes
of robots. I should be able to do get it to work with G-Code too, at least
the basic moves, G00, 01, 02, 03.

I have seen some Scorbot 4pc's for sale on eBay but so far none come with
the ISA controller card. I don't know the detail about the drive yet but it
might be compatible with some of the hardware available for LinuxCNC. I saw
other brands of educational robot arms on eBay but so far I have been able
to find the most information on the Scorbot's. I like the Amatrol Pegasus,
roller chain drive looks heavy duty, but from what I hear, Amatrol isn't
very helpful to hobbyists.

RogerN