Re: Computing Editorial (please read)

["Ross Simpson" <yeah_whatever>]

"Lee Hart" <leeahart@earthlink.net> wrote in message...

> > Now, is there anyone who does something else with their old Apple II?
> > Any new software, or hardware, development going on for the Apple II?
>
> I do volunteer work at my local elementary school. They have a lot of
> Apple IIs that aren't being used much any more (replaced by modern PCs).
> A few older kids have done some of their own programming on them. BASIC
> and LOGO seem to be the languages of choice.

That almost fits my description! Except, I used to do that & the Apple IIs
we received were shipped to the small Islands in the Pacific. I used to use
Apple IIc's & IIe's at school & the main languages used there was LOGO &
BASIC! Must of been the only person there who didn't trash those machines
(ungreatfuls).

> I don't work much with the Apple II, but here are three examples of
> projects that I have seen students do.
>
>  - Built a "turtle" robot out of an old disk drive and model car. The
>    head stepper steered the front wheels, and the rotation motor ran
>    the car's wheels. The write protect switch became the car's bumper.
>    Directly controlling the motors and sensing the switch is easy on
>    an Apple II. It would be very difficult on a PC (besides which,
>    the disk drives are far too delicate to be used this way).
>
>  - Connected a phototransistor, and wrote a program to capture the
>    stream of pulses from an infrared remote. Then playback these
>    sequences of pulses to drive an IR LED. Used this capability to
>    make a programmable remote for the TV/VCR/stereo in his bedroom.

I did something simular to this. All I remember having was a board which
connected to what was like a traffic light (think it was made of Leggo too)
& had to write a small program (in LOGO I think) to simulate a traffic
light.

There may have been some form of robotics which could be used using a
simular process. But I don't recall getting to that stage.

Regards,
Ross.