Poor Hero JR

The Hero Junior That Was Ran Over By A Car While Trying To Do It's Duty

The Hero Jr. was Heath's entry-level robot. That is, their cheapest. It didn't have an arm, but could move about on its three-wheel base, sense its surroundings, and talk. Its brain consisted of a Motorola 6808 eight-bit processor, a 32K EPROM, and 2K RAM (expandable to 24K). It used an SC-01 speech synthesizer and could sense sound, light, and nearby objects (using sonar). It could be programmed through the hex keypad on top of its "head." Physically, the robot was 19" high, 18" in diameter, and weighed 22 pounds. Short little squirt. Options included a transmitter (GDA-2800-3) that would allow it to sound an alarm or summon help if it was programmed to guard an area.
Anyway, Hero Jr. was a cheerful little robot. It would roll about happily chatting random phrases in its nasal, sing-song voice while avoiding objects. It couldn't maintain a straight course—its rear-wheel drive/steering motor lacked the circuitry to sense when it was drifting.

Hero Jr. would sit still when put in its "guard" mode. So if you were out for the evening and somebody broke into your home, your robot would wake up and ask for a password and--if not given the correct response—it would sing out "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! You are an intruder! I am summoning the police!" and then do whatever you programmed it to do with the GDA-2800-3 transmitter.

So, with that long build up, here's the tale of woe:

A customer called Heath Technical Consultation and told them he'd purchased the Hero Jr. with all the options. After successfully building it, he was testing it in his driveway when his wife backed the car out of the garage.

Hero Jr. sang out "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Aaaaaahhhh..." as it was crushed.

I don't know what the warranty status was on that, but it could be possible for an SC-01 speech synthesizer to make such a mournful cry if it's interrupted at the right moment.

Poor little robot...

Reprinted with permission of:

Bill Wilkinson - Check out his great Heathkit page here

For questions or comments, contact: hotwing@hero-1.com

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