Alberto's Blog

The beginning

I have felt attraction for technical fields since I was a child. Around 8 years old I used to design and build robots that could be transformed through a series of sliding and hinging parts into another things, of course they where following the Transformers trend and they where just unanimated dolls made of Tente the cheaper brother of Lego. I also liked very much constructing relatively large buildings full of secret rooms, mortal traps and treasures to be found by conveniently small action figures. In a year or so I started increasing complexity and ended up with various types of shooting machines, it was really fun to build and destroy entire scenarios using those machines. Some of them reached about 4 meters with their ‘powerfull shoots’ and they were completely developed with Tente, no external gadgets. Then I started noticing much more possibilities could be harnessed though combination of electric motors with Tente, this was a nice epoch full of propeller machines and cable controled cars (they could be driven with care on flat surfaces, and sometimes they lasted several minutes without breaking). A nice Tente idea was the introduction of vibrating engines coupled with little tiny skewed brushes that magically allowed for things to move, I even built a skating rink where the vibrating motor was located at the rink instead of in the skating figures. It should be obvious that I didn’t have access to any computer at this time, or I would have been totally absorbed by digital activities. Here are some naive niceties from those days: