Image via WikipediaAll those teenagers who are always messing with the hardware of any everyday gadget to robots, the host of TV show MythBusters, Grant Imahara gave few words of advice to support their obsession. Imhara attempted to help strengthen the instincts of Hardware Hackers; he began stating that “Anything that’s already broken is fair game! The worst-case scenario is it stays broken. The best-case scenario is you find out how it works or, even better, transform it into something else.”
Like all other kinds of hacking, Hardware hacking also gets your hands dirty and requires a sense of curiosity to know what and how things actually function. Imhara spoke on his show asserting that most of the hardware hackers gain that feeling of curiosity at a very early age; he said “I think it’s something you’re born with — the desire to know how things work inside.” He added “And you can tell your kid is a hardware hacker if none of the Hot Wheels cars have wheels, if the remote control gets take apart on a weekly basis.” “The best thing to do is give them more things to take apart so they can see how things work on the inside. Give them tools, and teach them how to use those tools,” Imhara added.
Imahara is also hosting a Memorial Day Science Channel special on combat robotics. He declared that he personally had this instinct and curiosity of hacking at a very young age. He stated: “Even when I was young, I would build things with Lego or make ‘robots’ out of cereal boxes — long before I learned metalwork. The desire to build was always there.” Even though Imahara is an electrical engineering today, he told that majority of the robot-builders he meets, who bring their bots into combat competitions, are from an extremely versatile range of educational and professional backgrounds.
Imhara announced that “When I started Battle Bots in 1999, the guy sitting next to me was a high school teacher with no robotics experience at all. There were special effects guys, engineers, software guys who just wrote code — all kinds of people who had a desire to build something.” Further stating that “they would do it in their garages or even their kitchens…. You don’t need to be an engineer or have your own machine shop.”
Summing up his thoughts he told that “I remember when I was a kid and I was interested in robots, there was really nothing out there but Erector Sets and Tinker Toys. But now there’s such a variety of robotics-specific choices that you can buy off the shelf and get someone building and programming and exploring.”
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