Big Run Texas Toy

BIG TRAK / bigtrak was a programmable electric vehicle created by Milton Bradley in 1979.

It was a six-wheeled tank with a front-mounted blue photon beam headlamp, and a keypad on top. The toy could remember up to 16 commands which it then executed in sequence (such as "go forward 5 lengths", "pause", "turn 30 degrees right", "fire phaser" and so on. There was a "repeat" instruction allowing simple loops, but the language was not Turing complete, lacking branching instructions; the Big Trak also lacked any sort of sensor input other than the wheel sensors.

There is now a small but dedicated Internet community who have reverse engineered the BIG TRAK and the Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller inside it (see external links).

The US and GB/European versions were noticeably different. The US version was moulded in gray plastic and labelled BIG TRAK whereas the GB version was white and labelled bigtrak with a different keypad.

Bigtrak also included an optional trailer accessory. Once hooked to Bigtrak, this trailer could be programmed to dump its payload.

Soviet clone

In the Soviet Union, a clone was made under "Elektronika IM-11" designation. The early production version was named "Lunokhod". It featured an obstruction sensor disguised as a plastic front bumper, which would stop the program when the toy got stuck. However, there was no provision for an accessory, and its motion sensor was based on a cheaper reed switch instead of an opto-isolator. A later version, named "Planetokhod," additionally featured a shootable rotor blade as an accessory, LED head and rear lamps, and the on/off switch was relocated to the rear side. A Soviet popular science journal Nauka i Zhizn published a detailed article on the IM-11.

Programmable keypad

All programming to BigTrak was done through the keypad shown here. There were no LED displays or ways to display program instructions, beyond actually running the program, which was done by pressing "GO". Other function keys included:

  • Forward/Backward: Move forward or backward in units of body length
  • Left/Right: Turn left or right in units of roughly 1/60th of a full rotation
  • HOLD: Pause in 1/10th of second time units (GB version; P: Pause)
  • FIRE: Fire the light bulb "laser" (GB; Photon Symbol)
  • CLR: Clear the program (GB; CM: Clear Memory)
  • CLS: Clear Last Step (GB; CE; Clear last step)
  • RPT: Repeat a number of steps (primitive loop) (GB; x2: Repeat key)
  • TEST: Run short test program
  • CK: Check last instruction (GB; Tick symbol)
  • Out: Dump optional trailer accessory
  • In: Reserved for future expansion (GB; missing. Disabled or not implemented on most if not all BigTraks)

Bigtrak Jr

Dubreq are releasing a desktop version of the Bigtrak toy along with new updated accessories to include a rocket launcher and a digital camera

Bigtrak Jr - Bigtrak Jr & rocket launcher

Re-Release

Zeon Ltd are planning a 2010 release of a full size replica of the original toy along with a re-release of the trailer accessory. , The colour and graphic scheme is re-created from the U.K version and all stickers have been redrawn as a direct copy of the original artwork.

See also

  • Robosapien - a remote-programmable humanoid robot
  • Omnibot

References

  1. ^ "Lunokhod for informatics study." - Nauka i Zhizn,1988,№4 (Russian magazine)
  2. ^ ,New bigtrak on Zeon Ltd company website
  3. ^ ,Stuff.tv article

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