Heros are no longer being made but Heath (Zenith) still offers some replacement parts. They had about 8 years of sales: 4,000 Hero Jr's, 3,000 Hero 2000's, 14,000 assembled Hero 1's. Ones with less capability didn't do as well but higher priced ones did ok in the market. Service and maintainability are a problem due to the sheer number of bolts, pulleys, boards, sensors, cables etc. Used ones can be picked up cheap - but caveat emptor. Heath still sells electronics training kits but nothing in robotics
There is a mailing group for hero owners managed by Dave Goodwin:
Hero-owners-request@smcvax.smcvt.edu
Send the following command in the message body:
Subscribe Hero-owners
You may also want to include a HELP command line to get the commands and their syntax. Note that the subject on the message is irrelevant. Of course, to post a message to the group, just send it to hero-owners at the same host.
The Mailserv software can handle files as well, but none are currently available. Hopefully, list subscribers will start to provide any nifty code they write for the archive.
Finally, the list of subscribers is available from the Mailserv. See the help file for how to get it. Questions or problems should be addressed to Goodwin@smcvax.smcvt.edu, not at the waldo address.
San Francisco Robotics Society of America (bsmall@sfrsa.com) used to have a Hero robot group meeting every month.