Stiquito a Blog -- Chapter 1

Johnathan Mills (1-19-1952 - 1-27-2016)

In 2003 I took a computer science course with Professor Johnathan Mills at Indiana University. The class was supposed to be an introduction to Assembly on the Motorola 68K, but I was enthralled by Mills's constant digressions into his research on analog computers. He was passionate about the idea that the parallelization inherent in analog circuits made them ripe for a comeback and the notion that a Turing complete analog computer was possible. I wound up taking several of his graduate level classes with him, tinkering on his Extended Analog Computers, trying to craft functions out of the chaos of  a sheet of electrodes and series of Łukasiewicz Logic gates.

He mentioned in class that he wrote a robotics textbook for high schools. This stuck in my mind, but you couldn't yet purchase anything immediately online, and I was too shy a student to ask how to get a copy. However, several years later I was working at a Half Price Books store when I stumbled across a copy, complete with the unopened robot kit! I promptly bought it, then of course, forgot about it for 2 decades 😀

As it turns out, in this year of Malört, 2025, I still don't know all that much about robotics, but it's never too late to cross off one of 2007's to-do list items 😀

In this series of blogs, I will read the book and hopefully build the attached Stiquito kit. For each chapter, I plan to share my thoughts. Perhaps, it will spur someone else's curiosity and be a memorial for an awesome teacher.

Chapter 1

The first chapter mostly concerns itself with explaining what the book is and how to use it. If you hadn't guessed yet, the book includes a small kit attached to the back sleeve which you use to produce a working hexapod robot.

A few things jumped out at me right away:

Analog Baby

"In the early 1990s, Dr Jonathan Mills was looking for a robotic platform on which to test his research on analog logic."

Of course there's an analog computer tie in, it's Mills! This made me smile. I can't wait to get to Chapter 12 – Łukasiewicz Insects 😂

Nitinol

The chapter explains how Nitinol, a fairly new and exciting material in robotics at the time, is used in the kit. It can contract and expand on demand, mimicking muscles more closely than servo motors. Mills loved to take inspiration from biology. He once told our class that "All computer scientists were failed biologists." He also took us on a field trip to see a "super computer" which turned out to be a wasp nest he'd been probing 😂 The use of a novel material that mimics nature is very fitting, but I wasn't expecting cutting edge, in a cheap kit taped to a book sleeve.

My other takeaway from Chapter 1, is this may be frustrating for me 😀It cautions the reader more than once with phrases like, "The most important thing to remember when building this kit is that Stiquito is a hobby kit; it requires hobby building skills, such as cutting, sanding, and working with very small parts." And friendly advice such as, if you don't have the skills required, or the patience to learn them "you should consider returning this book before opening the kit."

I am a Software Engineer, my hands are good at typing, and that is about it. The phrase bull in a china shop comes to mind when I attempt crafts. All that said, I feel a sense of responsibility since I am going to open that kit, and while not coordinated, I am very stubborn and persistent. I make no promises that this blog series finishes with a working robot, but I have high hopes. Stick around to find out.