Heathkit Hero Jr.

You never know when you stumble onto a good deal.  One night I was out talking a walk on trash night and noticed something familiar in front of a house down the street… a Heathkit Hero Jr robot with many accessories, being thrown out!

Several cartridges:

A minor break in the plastic case:

This was an unexpected find, so I had zero information about.  Fortunately, a fellow ex-Franklin Computer engineer Bob Grieb lived about a mile down the street and Bob had just finished doing restoration on MARCH’s HERO robot, so I brought it all to him.  Bob did some minor fixes, swapped out the dual 6 volt batteries with a single 12 volt one, and directed me where to get all the documentation and updated software to handle Y2K.

For a while I’d use this as a demonstration to Scouts about the history of home robots, but like several of my other robots, this one is also just sitting and gathering dust at this point.