Clash of the robot insects

Gakken's Mechamo Centipede is, as I explained in my review of it, a very cool toy.

But, as the following video demonstrates...

...it's not really in the same class as the Tyco N.S.E.C.T. Robotic Attack Creature.

I think a ludicrous name is, in this case, entirely justified. The RAC, as I'll call it for short, is big and beefy and obviously always in a very bad mood.

The RAC was one of the big toys of Christmas 2006, and I didn't manage to find one for a reasonable price. But then, in late 2007, a new-in-box unit showed up on eBay here in Australia and I picked it up for $AU75 delivered, which is well under the list price.

I had no idea the thing was going to be so big.

It's only a little longer than the 1.1-kilogram mostly-aluminium Centipede, but it weighs more than 2.3 kilos. That's more than your typical backyard-basher electric 10th-scale R/C truck.

I like the RAC's gait, too. The Centipede's mesmeric millipede-like circular gait is more interesting, but the Tyco robot walks not unlike a real beetle. Its legs whip forward and whack down onto the floor, then sweep backwards more slowly to propel the thing. The legs don't lift far enough to make the RAC capable of conquering much more than medium-pile carpet, but like the Centipede, it shouldn't have any trouble making it over trailing cables or rug fringes.

Oh, and that racket it makes on the hardwood floor? It's louder in person.

And it's not because of the one-piece plastic legs. The tips of the legs are actually covered with rubber. I think I might give them soft silicone socks, or something.

The pincers on the front are controlled by one of two index-finger triggers on the remote control. They're strong enough to allow the RAC to pull about as much weight as it can push, as long as there's something for it to bite onto.

The missile shooter (which is depicted as shooting sucker darts, but in my case just came with little plastic tubes with rubber bumpers on the front) is deployed by a safety-covered glowing switch on the remote (if you hold the switch down, it retracts again - I did that once by accident in the above video), and fired with the other trigger.

The launcher doesn't have much range, or any accuracy. But c'mon, people. It's a missile shooter! It pops up from under the bug's wing covers! And the RAC's eyes turn red when it does! That's awesome!

The RAC has a kid-sized transmitter that runs from a nine volt battery, just like every other cheap radio controlled toy. But that's the end of the bad news, electricity-wise.

First, yes you can get two and have them fight. My green model has a 27MHz radio, but there's also a blue one that's 49MHz.

And the RAC itself runs not from a horde of AA batteries, but from a standard six-cell rechargeable stick pack with a white nylon plug on it, of the sort you can buy from any hobby store. The bundled pack is a NiCd unit of unspecified capacity, and you also get a plugpack overnight charger. A proper hobby charger will (and in my case, did) charge the bundled pack much faster, and higher-capacity stick packs will also work fine in the RAC, as long as they've got the right plug.

Oh, and one 9V battery for the transmitter is included as well. Classy.

And now that I've gotten you all excited... I think Tyco's discontinued the Robotic Attack Creature. There are a couple of other toys in the N.S.E.C.T. line that still seem to be available from major retailers - Amazon, for instance, currently have a "Nano" version of the RAC for cheap, and some thing with a tail too. But the N.S.E.C.T. line doesn't seem to exist on the Mattel site any more. There's just this sad remnant.

Fortunately, though, plenty of dealers seem to still have at least some stock of the RAC, and some of the prices are very reasonable.

I haven't played with the thing for very long yet, or taken it to bits, so I don't know whether it's been discontinued because all of the legs always fall off after half an hour, or because of the abominable foot-racket, or because kids just didn't dig something that can't tear around fast enough to break when it hits a chair. Mattel/Tyco have remedied this last with the even more ridiculous looking Tri-Clops, which should be of considerable attention to nerds because it is, I think, the first mass-market toy with proper omnidirectional wheels.

But that, of course, means that the Tri-Clops doesn't have legs. So although it does seem to work pretty well...

...I can't say I'm very excited about it.

(Actually, looking at Amazon again, I note that the 27MHz and the 49MHz Tri-Clops toys are currently discounted by seventy-five per cent. So if you live somewhere to which Amazon will deliver things other than books and DVDs, I think you're now practically obliged to buy one.)

The Robotic Attack Creature is probably not nearly as hackable as the straightforward, open-chassis Centipede. It's also completely devoid of educational value, since unlike the Centipede, it comes assembled and ready to go, rather than as a box full of (surprisingly easy to assemble) pieces.

If you're looking for something to keep your cat on its toes, though, the RAC gets both thumbs up from me.

See-through aviation

After I saw this episode of Boing Boing TV...

...I of course had to check out Carl Rankin's Web site.

Wherein is prominently displayed The Mama Bear...

..."the largest radio-controlled plane constructed from plastic-wrap, drinking straws and tape ever built".

Super-light spindly radio controlled planes are not new. Gossamer concoctions of balsa, carbon fibre and Mylar film have been buzzing peacefully around in high-school halls for ages, and they're now even leaking into the commercial market.

Those indomitable little foam living-room planes and twin-motor helicopters (the original Picoo Z and its numerous, often inferior, knock-offs) are cheaper even than a plane made from take-out containers. But they're not actually very controllable - you can only kind of suggest where you'd like them to go, after which luck takes over.

Carl Rankin's creations, in contrast, are proper controllable aircraft made on a near-zero budget for everything except the electronics.

A bit more lasing

Herewith, the previously mentioned 350mW laser, this time assaulting some plain brown paper. You don't have to hold the dot very carefully still to burn the paper away, or even get it smouldering.

The brown paper looks like red paper because I put a red gel (some of the large amount of Primary Red that I had left over after making a couple of pairs of Bill Beaty's IR goggles) over the lens.

Without the gel, the super-bright dot would have made it very difficult to see what was going on, just as it does in the match-lighting clip.

(Yes, at some point I'm actually going to finish a review of this alarming device, not to mention the two other models that Wicked Lasers/Techlasers sent me.)

Bug zapping

No video this time, but I have a provisional answer to the question I'm sure you've all been asking:

Can you kill an insect with a 350mW laser?

Well, I just managed to shoot a cockroach off the wall.

The bug clearly didn't like the beam on its body. It wasn't possible for me to hold the beam still enough to just burn the roach's head clean off (350mW will burn most plastic just about instantly, and is clearly powerful enough to incinerate a bug's head, but only if you hold the beam still on the target for a moment). But after I'd shot the roach for several seconds it fell off the wall, into the grasp of the rather intrigued cats.

(Who then probably juggled it for a bit and then lost it under the fridge, or something. They're not exactly killers.)

I don't think the beam had actually damaged the roach enough that it had to fall off the wall; I think its little flowchart brain had just decided that it was being exposed to fire, or something, and should therefore engage its emergency drop-to-somewhere-safer subroutine.

I await the arrival of a mosquito with interest.

My new favourite flashlight

There are quite a lot of flashlights in this house.

So, of course, I had to go and buy another one.

Old flashlight in hand

It only cost me ten bucks from this eBay seller. And it's possible that it's actually a genuine antique.

Which is a bit unusual, for an electrical device. Especially one that works.

The generally accepted definition of an antique is something at least a hundred years old, and flashlights that looked much like this one certainly were on sale a hundred years ago.

The first portable electric lamps appeared in the last few years of the nineteenth century. The first commercially successful one was the boxy Acme Electric Light, in 1896. But the easier-to-hold tubular flashlight was first sold commercially, by one Conrad Hubert's Ever Ready Company, in 1899.

Old flashlight

This light probably isn't nearly that old, but it's still got the thick "bullseye" glass lens that all tubular flashlights had for the first decade or so of their existence.

(If you ask me, "bullseye lens" should only be the term for the concentric-circles fresnel lens, as seen in lighthouses and stage spotlights. This kind of flashlight lens could more correctly be called a "dome". But "bullseye" seems to be the most common term. "Walleye lens" seems to be another term for the same thing.)

The bullseye lens was not a good design.

It's either planoconvex (flat on one side, convex on the other) or, as in this case, slightly concave on the inside and much more convex on the outside. Either way, the lens gives the flashlight a very broad beam.

The beam width is at least 60 degrees, for this light, and it has no central "hot spot" at all. It's quite unlike the output of the more usual kind of incandescent-bulb flashlight, with a thin flat lens on the front and a relatively large reflector around the bulb.

A super-wide beam is great for seeing where you're going, but useless for seeing anything at a distance. This was quite disastrous for flashlights a hundred years ago, because they weren't very bright at the best of times.

This light was probably made to take a tungsten-filament bulb, but those weren't very efficient until the coiled-coil filament was introduced in 1936. Earlier still were the even dimmer, more fragile and rather inconsistent carbon-filament bulbs. And the old batteries had lousy capacity, and lousy current delivery, too.

So overall, old flashlights needed all the light-concentrating help they could get.

But instead, everything that wasn't big and boxy like the Acme Electric Light got a fish-eye lens.

It's been postulated that the bullseye lens was so popular for so long because consumers thought it concentrated, rather than dispersed, the light from the bulb. At a glance, you might think that - look at the bulb through the lens and it appears huge, just as it would if it were in the middle of a big reflector.

But with a bullseye lens, the bulb appears huge from every angle, because light's being thrown everywhere.

I suppose people were accustomed to wide-angle illumination from fuel-burning lanterns. The flame from a lamp with a wick is too large a light source to be effectively concentrated by a reflector of readily carryable size, and there are further problems with just getting a reflector in there, next to a hot and possibly smoky naked flame.

Directional lamps did have reflectors - miners' acetylene carbide lamps are an excellent, and surprisingly practical, example - but they still threw a very wide beam.

(Which, in the case of the carbide lamp, was quite respectably bright even by modern standards. A small "helmet" carbide lamp can easily throw as much light as a five-watt incandescent bulb, and it could do it for several hours. Five watts for five hours is 25 watt-hours; that's about the same amount of energy as you'd get from two modern C alkalines. Carbide lamps are little more than a hundred years old; they were quite revolutionary in their day, and far superior in light output and safety to kerosene or other oil lamps. Carbide lamps were still perfectly capable of burning your house down, though; you could only do that with the new-fangled electric lights if you really tried.)

Bullseye-lens flashlights hung around long after the common availability of modern large-reflector, flat-lens lights - note the Prohibition-era hip flask in the shape of a bullseye flashlight here. So it's quite possible my little light is only about seventy years old. That's still pretty impressive for a device that's still useful today, though.

A nice one of these lights would be an Eveready Daylo, or something. This one's a brandless version with no decoration, cheaply made from sheet metal, so it's probably worth nothing to a collector.

Like other lights of this size and vintage, this flashlight wants a weird battery - a 2R10 "Duplex" or "2B". That's a three-volt, two-cell battery that's apparently about 75 by 22 millimetres in size, and still available today, if you're really dedicated and/or willing to take apart another battery. The 2R10's dimensions make it quite magnificently incompatible with every common battery today.

A 75mm-long battery must have been a pretty tight fit in this light, though, because it turns out that a modern 18650-size (18mm wide, 65mm long) lithium cell fits very nicely, especially if I screwed the bulb all the way in.

But, to do that, I did need a bulb.

The bulbs this old light uses, fortunately, are quite standard. They're the same miniature Edison screw (MES) type that survive in small cheap lights today. (Though no doubt not for much longer, since LEDs are now clearly superior.)

An odd flattened-bulb vintage MES lamp came with the flashlight, but of course did not work any more. I had a cheap push-light doodad sitting around waiting to have some RGB LEDs put in it, so I harvested the bulb from that. It was meant to run from four 1.5V cells and so should have been reasonably bright from the roughly four volts of the 18650 cell, but it was actually quite dim, and died after not many minutes of use.

So I got an Eveready MES bulb for "5D" flashlights, rated at 0.3 amps at 6.2 volts, and tried that. The flashlight's much brighter now, though it's probably running its bulb at rather less than half of its 1.9 watt rating.

Old flashlight lens

The low voltage makes the flashlight's output very yellow, which I find quite pleasing in this age of blue-white LED flashlights. The light colour's probably quite similar in hue to the light from its original lamp, but brighter. It's perfectly usable as a night-time seeing-where-you're-going light.

I wasn't expecting it to be this easy to make this light work. I thought I'd have to hack some LEDs into it, or something. But it turned out to be easy to fix, in a more authentic manner.

It's been foggy, lately, and now it's getting dark. I believe I may procure myself a Webley revolver, and sally forth with my newly purchased "hand-torch" to investigate the night-cult that drunkard spoke of in the inn, before his fellows silenced him so brutally.

I'm told that a torch whose light is feeble may be a blessing.

There are things which are best not clearly seen.


Buying one

The eBay dealer I bought my bullseye-lensed flashlight from now seems to be dormant, but similar items show up on eBay pretty frequently. They can be a pain to find, though.

This search right here finds anything that could be a real old bullseye flashlight and filters out a lot of useless results, but it's not quite the same as the actual search I've got saved and sending me e-mails just in case a cheap light even prettier than the one I've got shows up. That's not because my search is a trade secret, but because there's a limit to the length of the search string you can link to via the eBay affiliate thing. The full search string, for your cutting and pasting pleasure, is:

(old,vintage,antique) (torch,flashlight) -paisley -"pipe lighter" -"torch green lighter" -"green flame" -"torch lighter" -blow -heat -kero -kerosene -kerosine -projector -patent -bulbs -pin -pins -bearers -guitar -spirit -blowtorch -cutting -bead -"ornamental lighter" -"ornamental gun"

To throw an even wider net, it's easy to search for flashlights in the eBay "collectibles" category (here on eBay Australia and here on eBay UK, both with the added search term "torch" to find Commonwealth-usage listings and clutter the results with ancient rusty dangerous blowtorches). But the results in that category aren't very good; you get a lot of brand-new LED lights and plastic crap from the Seventies. People selling bullseye-lensed lights unfortunately seldom describe them with a handy searchable word like "bullseye" or "dome", so you pretty much just have to scan the thumbnail pictures until you find one.

Do the same search in the "antiques" category (here on eBay Australia, here on eBay UK; I've left "torch" off the search string this time to avoid zillions of hits for tiki torches and candelabras) and and you'll find a lot more genuinely old flashlights. "Antique" bullseye-lens lights that aren't just a pile of rust with a lump of scratched glass in the middle, though, are generally pretty expensive.

Some of them are very beautiful, though. The "bicycle light" type that's a wooden box with a handle on top and a lens on the side is particularly appealing, especially after a dab of wood polish. Box-lights usually have plenty of room inside for modern batteries and lamps, too, so you probably won't even need to disturb the dreams of the world's flashlight collectors by destroying the old fittings in order to shoehorn in a pink LED and lithium battery.

A familiar tale

Lego vignette

This Lego vignette/comic is funny, true, and an effective deployment of a microscale Millennium Falcon. I don't think you could ask for more.

(See also the classic "I'm naked! No clothes!")

Incidentally, the old #4488 Mini Falcon is a great set, and pretty easy to make up from stock pieces, though you'll of course miss out on the big printed dish if you make it that way. The comic refers to the gigantic #10179 Falcon, by far the largest Lego set released to date.

Lego have really milked the old Falcon since they got the Star Wars license - there've been no fewer than four quite different Falcon sets.

The right to bear soft squishy arms

For years, it's been virtually impossible to buy Nerf guns here in Australia.

Giant pump-up water guns? No problem.

But guns that shoot sucker darts or foam balls? Not happening. You could go to a discount store and buy one of those crappy off-brand guns with the one-piece translucent rubber darts, but if you wanted something from one of the major brands, you were out of luck. Well, unless you were crazy enough to pay four times the purchase price for shipping from the States.

I presume this was because some pressure group or other convinced all of the toy shops that sucker dart guns were responsible for the Port Arthur massacre, or something.

But I'm happy to say that it's changing.

Why, just the other day, I successfully bought a few Nerf N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3s (one for my Toy Weapon Wall, the rest for the all-purpose Present Pile) for nine bucks a pop, on special at Kmart.

The Kmart catalogue promised that the much cooler Maverick six-shooter would also be on special, for only ten Australian dollars per unit.

But it was Kmart, so their stock as usual looked as if it'd been piled up by people with push brooms, and after you sorted through the mess you found that the thing you really wanted wasn't there.

Apparently Target stocks Mavericks as well, now - but the nearest Target store to me is more than forty kilometres away, while Kmart's just up the road.

[I've been there, now. They didn't bloody have any either.]

The EX-3's better than I thought it'd be. Surprisingly accurate, and the fake laser sight (a red LED with an adjustable lens in front of it) is cool, too. Like a proper laser sight, it turns on when you partially depress the trigger. Unlike a proper laser sight, children cannot damage their eyesight with it. And if you don't like it, you can just not put batteries in the gun.

I still definitely need a Maverick, though. I think I can survive without the celebrated Longshot sniper rifle, but I would also like the Buzz Bee lever-action rifle and totally awesome double-barrelled shotgun.

(Kmart had the Buzz Bee Tommy 20 battery-powered submachine gun for cheap, too, but video of it in action left me underwhelmed. I've got rubber-band guns for when I want to spend far more time reloading than shooting. And then there's this ridiculous thing.)

And yes, I'm aware that Nerf fans modify their guns for (much) greater power and accuracy, and apply amazing paint jobs. I can't be bothered with the painting, and would rather keep my toys safe for kids and drunks to use than crank 'em up by drilling out the air restrictors and installing an umbrella spring.

If you're one of those eBay dudes who sells pre-modded guns, though, do feel perfectly free to send me one for review!

You never know when a Nerf gun with a hundred-foot range may save your life, after all.

Fzat!

I've been somewhat distracted by some things that arrived for review yesterday.

Ay chihuahua.

It's a "Crossfire" from Techlasers, the "off brand" store operated by Wicked Lasers, who sent me the less powerful laser about which I rambled on last year.

Techlasers, basically, sells the same superpowered lasers that various other stores sell, only cheaper. They blatantly list the names their competitors use for the same products, with the prices, to make your comparison shopping easier. I like that.

With the money you save, please, please buy some safety goggles.

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