phoenixgarage.org

Ever play with (or own) a Milton Bradley Big Trak? Ever wanted to control it with a computer? Want to interface your Arduino with one? Read this "future past" article to find out how!

I was a very spoiled child; years ago (I had to have been in the 4th or 5th grade), I asked for, and received, a Milton Bradley Big Trak (and Transport!) for Christmas from my parents. Look around on the internet a little bit, and you will find some very interesting information about them; even more so if you are into electronics and robotics, like I am. Indeed, that Big Trak was one piece among many that held and inspired me as a child to explore computers, programming, electronics, and robotics - a journey of learning I am still on. One interesting tidbit, for instance: The motor-controllers in the Big Trak only use two transistors - essentially a half h-bridge! The designers likely did this to cut back on parts counts to keep cost lower; this half h-bridge used a double-ended power supply formed by a split 6-volt DC battery pack composed of 4 "D" cell batteries...

More than one person got the bug to buy this toy; it was really one of the first computer-based programmable robot toys to be released; most toys prior to it used simple punch-card, optical, or cam-based systems to allow a kid to "program" the path of the vehicular toy. The Big Trak, instead, let you program the toy in a style of LOGO, with repeatable segments, recall, debugging, etc.

Steve Ciarcia, a guy who was doing homebrew microcontrollers and home automation experiments long before many of us were born, wrote the following article (IIRC, for Byte Magazine), and I recently found it in a scan of Volume 3 of his Circuit Cellar books, on Google Books. While you may never run across one to hack today (short of buying one off Ebay - they're minor collector items, though; it would almost be a sacrilege to tear one apart), reading the following article shows that while we have come far, in a way we're still rehashing the same old-same old. In it, he shows how to hook up the Big Trak and control it from a home computer in BASIC, using a custom one-way wireless modem using walkie-talkies (!):

A Computer Controlled Tank (new window)

Enjoy!