Back to Work

Time to get serious again and actually follow through on a few items now that work has slowed down. First steps to Project Roomba Sentry are complete. The Axon from Society of Robots will be the temporary later being replace with a smaller and cheaper Arduino. I need to order the necessary serial cable to hack the Roomba and start constructing/designing the necessary sensors and hardware that will make this an effective guard.

No Updates

Have not updated this blog due to lack of robot work and other important things so here is an update: I need a cheap, tracked rc car/tank to modify into my next project. If anyone(as if anyone really reads this) sees one of these, please contact me with location and price.

As to the robot I discussed previously, I have already stripped it of parts for testing of other ideas/projects but I will try to get a few pictures of Tupperbot as it was affectionately named after a stroll around the office. Basically, cardboard wheels are horrible and using weak batteries makes for a weak robot.

One of my next projects will hopefully be something similar to this: Spider Bot

I also have plans to make a variety of small, annoying gadgets to liven up the new cubicle I am supposed to occupy within the next 3 months. First will be a motion detecting, auto targeting usb missle launcher followed by a variety of obnoxious noise makers. If those go over well, I will move on to remote controlled "tanks" that can possibly play laser tag!

Board Soldered

So it seems I lost any skill I had with a soldering iron and small electronic components. The underside of my breadboard is a mess and I am quite afraid of a meltdown. Good news, I bought double of everything so even if I fry something, I can make the board up again pretty quickly.

Hopefully the Axon will arrive within the next few days so I can start construction on my legs while waiting for the connectors to come in for my other robot. I am eager to test out my range detectors and servos and see what kind of resolution and strength I get out of them.

The messed up breadboard will be up within a few days so you can make fun of the horrid work I did.

Meaning of this (blog's)life

The intended purpose of this blog is to keep up to date information of any projects/fun stuff that I am currently working on. My plan is to start with a version of the $50 robot from www.societyofrobots.com which I will then heavily modify to test different algorithms and concepts.

My future plans include a legged creation, hexapod or more, to resemble a crab that will be able to traverse uneven terrain while making intelligent decisions of where to go and which dog to chase. I would also like to make a cheap quadruped that can be modified with attachments(homemade) and easily programmed in C to be used in cubicle warfare. Think 1984 Tom Selleck movie "Runaway" featuring Gene Simmons.

I'll do my best to keep this up to date with pictures, findings, and maybe even some pseudo code of whats happening.