Automatons! The Visual History of Robots and a Raspberry Pi Powered K-9!

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

We all love a good robot (some of us love them too much) be it K-9, K-1 or even the robot writing this article (oh no, I’ve said too much) – across the whole of Sci-Fi and beyond, they serve as a barometer for both what we needed as a society and, more importantly, what we feared.

So settle in, get your robo-butler to pour you a drink and watch this fascinating journey through the history of Sci-fi through its most iconic automatons courtesy of illustrator Scott Park.

There are some noticeable absences (no Robby the Robot, no original T-1800, not even K-1 from Robot! ), a lack of definition between a robot and a cyborg, the wrong Marvin the Paranoid Android design for the TV series, ditto the Cylons, some of the dates are a little off and I’m pretty sure Agent Smith isn’t a robot but if you can accept a few gremlins in the system (Oh no, the robots have turned against their masters! Run! Run for your lives!) then it’s an interesting visual trip through Sci-Fi lore.

Oh, and the song? Kraftwerk. Who else?

Speaking of robots and masters, English IT architect Richard Hopkins has built his very own K-9 –  complete with wagging tail, flashing eyes, flapping radar ears, nodding head, moving body, head-mounted camera AND soon-to-be revealed speech recognition – using a Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized computer made in the UK to try and help kids to code.

You can read the full ambitious story of how K-9 came to be and the sheer scope of Hopkins undertaking over at the great man’s blog.

The post Automatons! The Visual History of Robots and a Raspberry Pi Powered K-9! appeared first on Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews.