Penguin Robot Manufacturing Discontinued by Parallax in 2010
Parallax Forum Postings
Humanoido writes: I have found the original Parallax Forum posting from 2010 and 2011, the time when manufacturing of Parallax Penguin Robots were discontinued and the robot had a closeout offer.
As fate would have it, the remaining new board anomaly Penguins were offered on a promotion closeout with a repair kit. After that, no new known Penguins were ever again manufactured by Parallax. That's unfortunate because the new design of Penguin was fantastic, with new ports, new display capabilities for language and graphics, and a host of other improvements.
The new Penguin worked when connected to the computer to avoid the reset problem, or it worked autonomous after installing the repair kit. If Parallax had stayed the course with Penguin Robot, it could have upgraded over the years into an even more fantastic robot with AI artificial intelligence of all world knowledge and full English conversation ability. Here's a prelude into some 2021 work by Humanoido. Those keeping their Parallax Penguin Robots are setting on top of a potential gold mine.
Parallax Forum Postings
Ken Gracey 2010-05-10 15:37 edited 2010-05-10 15:37
I'll come back and answer the Penguin questions soon with far more detail - today I'm working on some inventory preparations (from which I cannot escape) along with preparations for going to UPEC. Short story is that Penguins have a very high cost of manufacturing and a challenging PCB design issue. As soon as I have some time I'll give this topic the attention it deserves (David Carrier may also reply). Thanks, Ken
Ken Gracey 2010-05-12 20:49 edited 2010-05-12 20:49
Hey guys, Let me explain why the Penguins are currently shown as discontinued.
We recently made a significant board revision for Penguin, making another I/O free, adding some caps on the power supply, sending I/Os to the display through a shift register, and making an improvement to the programming circuitry. Two of our crew made the revisions to the Penguin PCB and tested prototypes internally. The only problem is that they overlooked a situation very common with Penguins: resets when not connected to the USB cable. Pretty basic, but we blew it and sent this board to production. Now, we have 500 Penguin PCBs which only run when connected to a USB cable. The fix consists of a jumper and an piggy-backed SMT resistor (David Carrier could clarify). Because the repair consists of a tynar wire and resistor it is not suitable for internal rework and subsequent sale.
In addition to these 500 boards (that erco will now buy, with hardware!) we have around 100-250 Penguin hardware kits in assorted colors. Considering rework isn't an option, we can (a) redesign a battery pack board (that's the one with the problem) and continue or (b) discontinue. Because I don't have time to get involved in the redesign and our staff is so busy, I've taken (b) for now. We are short on staff, too. We've added two new positions in engineering for this kind of work. Nobody has left Parallax, but our business and workload is evolving. We need more engineers. More to follow - I'm on my way to UPEC right now. I'm open to whatever ideas you guys may have to help out in this case. We could always distribute what we have with a "repair kit" that our customers install.
The Offer
Penguin Rework Instructions
REWORK Schematic from WBA
