Byte Magazine June 1977 Volume 2 Number 6
From the cover: Newt, a mobile. cognitive robot
Amazingly, this device, built by researchers at Duane Physical Laboratory of the University of Colorado, has a very early digital camera. It contains a 32x32 array of photodiodes on a chip measuring about 4mm x 4mm. Basically a 1024, or 1 kilapixel early equivalent of a modern CCD!Unfortunately pixels don't really exist yet, at least not in a way that makes them addressable individually, text characters are built into the screen hardware, memory simply isn't big enough for raster displays of tiny dots at this point in time.
You can wire the robot up to an oscilloscope and view the output from the photodiodes by converting the data to.. a... waveform?
So, this is a plug socket:
And this is two different views of what it looks like when viewed by Newt's 1024 diode camera, output to an oscilloscope, the view on the right is closer to the socket:
Amazing stuff, cutting edge lab robotics research. It does look a lot like the hobby kits you can buy on Amazon, only the camera has a 10MP ccd instead of a 1KP photdiode array. I'm sure the cost was a lot higher too.
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Much of the rest of this issue is circuit diagrams and the only code listing is Motorola 68000 assembly language. Geeks back then were hardcore.
But there was an ad I liked:
The NOVAL 760 Computer.
According to the rest of the ad, it comes fully assembled, and tested. Not a kit!
Awesome!