engineering

The Trons

The Trons is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Trons rather than just read about it. In short: The Trons are a New Zealand self-playing robot band created by the musician Greg Locke based in Hamilton. The band consists of four robots, created from scratch using a variety of spare parts and electronic equipment.

Key takeaways

The Trons belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Trons to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Trons from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Trons are a New Zealand self-playing robot band created by the musician Greg Locke based in Hamilton. The band consists of four robots, created from scratch using a variety of spare parts and electronic equipment. The band is named after their home city's nickname, "The Tron".

History During the 1990s, while a member of the New Zealand musical duo The Emersons, Greg Locke toyed with the concept of developing a robotic drummer. This concept eventually grew into the idea of creating an entire band of robots. The four robots took about nine months to build and were created from electronic components of decommissioned photocopy-card vending machines (which formed part of Locke's daytime career), various scavenged parts and some advanced equipment. The construction of the band was assisted with a grant by the Hamilton Community Arts Council.

About The band is managed by its creator, Greg Locke, a New Zealand musician and mechanical engineer who has played in garage bands including The Hollow Grinders. The band contains no human members, consisting only of four robots named Ham, Wiggy, Swamp and Fifi. Ham plays the rhythm guitar and does the vocals. The vocals are produced through bits of tape loop created on an old tape machine and looped. Wiggy plays lead guitar which is single-string. It is only possible for the robots to play four chords. Swamp performs on the drums, using a pie-plate as a snare. Swamp was written several times on the drum set that Locke purchased for this robot (he guesses that it must have been the name of the band who had used it), thus the robot's name. Fifi plays the keyboard, using only one "hand". She originally played bass but performed poorly at it. The robots are made from a combination of scrap parts and more complex equipment and are controlled via a computer using a "top-secret" software package. The use of "flimsy material" makes the robots' actions similar to that of a human to create human-like music. Despite being robots, the members of the Trons are often treated as human by fans to the point where Swamp has received date requests. Locke explains this tendency to treat them as human arises from the "human element" required to create music.

Critical reputation The Trons' first dip into stardom came from their YouTube video, which received over 80,000 hits in two days, going on to amass almost a million hits in only a few months. They have received mostly positive critical acclaim, being described as "pure genius" and as being better than Grammy Award-winning British band Coldplay.

Discography

Albums The Trons, Pieplate Records, 2011

Extended plays Sister Robot, 2010

References

External links Official website Waikato robot band an internet hit David Farrier meets The Trons on Campbell Live on YouTube THE TRONS play live in Auckland, New Zealand on YouTube

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Trons

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Trons claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Trons before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Trons ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Trons

In research: The Trons appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Trons in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Trons is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2000s robots, Culture in Hamilton, New Zealand, Individual robots, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Trons outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Trons in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Trons means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Trons out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Trons in simple terms?

Why does The Trons matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Trons?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Trons.