Muscle Wires Project Book : A Hands-on Guide to Amazing Robotic Muscles That Shorten When Electrically Powered

Presenting everything you need to successfully design, build, and operate devices with Muscle Wires – amazing nickel-titanium filaments that actually contract when electrically powered and lift thousands of times their own weight.

Topics include: Basic lever action, ratchets and latches, model railroad crossing, AC power circuit, solar power circuit, paper airplane launcher, life-like butterfly, rubber tube “flexi”, proportional control, radio control interface, programmable multiple wire controller & serial port interface, PC parallel port interface and much more. Boris the six-legged motorless miniature walking machine.

EXPLORE - Get the facts behind the unusual properties of Muscle Wires. Study their uses in heat engines, industrial, medical and aerospace applications, electronic and mechanical devices, prosthetic limbs, robotics, virtual reality systems, products and more.

LEARN - Get the essential Dos and Don'ts of designing, constructing and powering Muscle Wires devices. Take best advantage of their small sizes and amazing strengths. Discover essential tricks and secrets to getting maximum performance and lifetimes from your applications.

BUILD - Create dozens of devices from simple levers to multi- action robots. Get detailed instructions for fifteen hands-on projects (from simple lever mechanisms, to Boris, the six legged motorless walking machine), plus sources for wires, materials, electronic components, and software. Develop your own Muscle Wire projects for:

* Model Railroads * Custom Electronic Devices

* Science Fair Projects * Radio Control Vehicles

* Computer-controlled Systems * Animated Models

* Ultra-small Machines & Robots * Movie Effects

A complete and concise reference guide for engineers, designers, experimenters, students, and anyone interested in motorless Muscle Wire motion! Ages 10 and up. Soft cover, 128 pages.

When four-year-old Roger Gilbertson learned how to tear tape from the dispenser, thus gaining the ability to put things together, it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination.

Since then, Roger (now married with children of his own) has mastered many other techniques for assembling devices. In college, he produced a film and computer study of the walking patterns of legged animals. This research inspired plans for robot mechanisms that adopted many of the structures of living creatures, but these early designs proved difficult to build using electric motors.

Roger realized he needed a material that could expand or contract in response to electrical stimulation, like an “electric muscle fiber." He found it just two years later while working for a Silicon Valley electronics firm. When he came across the samples of a Japanese-made shape memory alloy, Roger immediately began building mechanisms, and eventually began working with the manufacturer.

In 1986, Roger and his friend Christopher Paine founded Mondo-tronics, Inc. to facilitate shape memory alloy development and to distribute products, information and enthusiasm for this rapidly developing technology, dubbed Muscle Wires. Over the years, Mondo-tronics has won awards from the Western Association of Visual Merchandisers, Popular Science Magazine, the Robotics Society of America, Yahoo.com and many others.

In 1995 Gilbertson began offering Muscle Wires products and a wide selection of robot kits and robot-related books, toys, Hollywood movies and more.He has provides training, educational materials, and custom designs using the latest in shape memory technology for numerous clients include Neiman Marcus, the Nature Company, NASA/JPL, Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic, the Smithsonian Institute, Boeing, San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.