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8.4

Author: James Conrad and Jonathan Mills Excerpt: This second book on StiquitoTM present you with a unique opportunity to learn about the field of engineering, electronics, and robotics in an original way. This book provides you with the skills and equipment to build a very small robot, instructions on how to build electronic controls for your robot, and a robot kit. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

Stiquito for Beginners is basically a book geared at people with little or no robotics/electronic experience. The book takes you through a few chapters of the book take you through engineering processes, electrical and nitinol basics. Nitinol is the key ingredient in the Stiquito robot (shown right) - it is a dynamic alloy that contracts when heated and regains it's shape once the current is removed.

The book comes with all necessary materials to create your robot, all you'll need are things like needle-nose pliers, craft knife, a ruler and a lot of patience. Once you've gone through the first few chapters you can start building your robot. The initial few steps are relatively easy to do, bending the legs and inserting them into the main body of the robot. Soon, though, the instructions become rather muddled and confusing and the accompanying diagrams seem to give you opposing instructions to those given in the book. This made some segments of creating the robot incredibly difficult to fathom. Nevertheless, I built the robot after about 4 hours. To find about more about the robot itself, plus more on construction and operation see the Generation5 review.

The excellent feature of the book though is that it doesn't stop once you've built the robot. It has an additional four chapters that describes different control methods and the future of walking robots. The first control method is a simple manual controller - the book provides all the necessary materials to build this controller. It also has a PC-based controller that allows you to connect the Stiquito up to your parallel port and program it by sending bytes to it through a little circuit you create. Finally, it has an autonomous version that uses an analog circuit (also available as a kit) that you attach the Stiquito to and allow it to walk about on it's own.

As a book, Stiquito for Beginners is excellent - the additional information is very welcome and can serve as an introduction to robotics, electronic and programming if needs be. The book also makes sure it gives the reader enough information to allow them to follow up on the projects, either by using the "Advanced Experiments with Stiquito" book or the additional control kits described. The book lists manufacturers and suppliers of Stiquito and nitinol equipment as well (US only). As a construction manual (basically, Chapter 5), the book doesn't do as well - the diagrams are often vague and conflicted with the text. Any child trying to build this will definitely need adult help, and any adult will need the aid of a friend (as I did).

Nevertheless, Stiquito for Beginners does was it set out to do, introduces the reader to simple, small, inexpensive hexapod robots! It is impossible to not recognize Stiquito for Beginners as an excellent book because of the dodgy construction chapter - an excellent book at a very reasonable price.