Tinkerings and musings of a strange mind…

I got a visit from the geek fairies recently…

It’s the Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk!

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So last year for Christmas I wanted to make a present for everyone.  So for my mom, I took a picture of myself and framed it.  But why settle for an ordinary picture frame when you can do something cool with junk?

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As another weekend project to keep me occupied, I built a simple FM radio transmitter bug.  For use as a baby monitor, of course.  It’s dirt simple, small enough to fit on the back of a 9v battery, and works pretty well

This idea was shamelessly stolen from LucidScience of course.  It’s just amazing what you can make with junk laying around the house.  And I bet if you wired in a razor blade radio instead of a microphone, the amplifier stage could make the radio work with regular headphones…

Here’s a classic and simple little weekend project.  Turn a computer ATX power supply that was going to be thrown out into a useful benchtop power supply.  For >$10 worth of parts, you can turn a piece of junk into something useful.

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When the zombipocalypse happens, staying connected with other survivors might be a useful thing.  Perhaps the single most basic tool to do this with is a radio.  But what if you can’t get your hands on a working radio when the rotters come shambling for your spicy brains?  Or what if you can’t find those blasted batteries?

Well, it turns out that you can build an AM radio receiver that requires no external power source using just some wire, a pencil, and a razor blade.  Some other goodies like paperclips, thumbtacks, and a chunk of wood make it even easier.  If you can’t manage to find those things in a post-SHTF world, you should just massage some barbecue sauce in your hair and just get it over with…

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So, once upon a time, there was a really cool guy named Shane. He made a blog called Hackosis. However, he let his domain registration lapse, and the hacky goodness was lost to the void of 404…

However, it is lost no more! I got a hold of him and offered him a subdomain on my site. So now, I present the original hackosis in all it’s glory: http://hackosis.chiefcrash.com/

Check it out, lots of nifty stuff there…

Ok, so the robot is still cooking. It’s hard trying to learn like 4 programming languages at once. And since the robot isn’t for work or school, I’m taking a little break from it for now.

But, as a little side project, I’m building an alarm clock. Just for giggles. It’ll be crazy once it’s done, but for now, it ain’t much. check it out:

Ok, so after some drama, some bullcrap, and a temporary bout of homelessness, I’m back. Let’s try to put something on this dang blog…

So in Part 2, we had managed to find a way to get our laptop to charge from the robot. Catch was, the laptop was always charging from the robot. We don’t want that. Let’s fix that…

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Ok, so if you’ve been following us from part 1 of the crash course, you’ll know that we’re beginning to build a very simple robot. So simple, it’s effectively a laptop duct taped to a robot vacuum cleaner. Since Damon has done such a good job of documenting the process up to here, i’m just going to refer you to his Instructables page. But let’s talk about the important improvements in this step…

In case you’re wondering, i did the optional power step he describes. *THIS* is why I’m using the OLPC laptop for now: nothing else is this flexible with their power inputs. I can’t hook up anything else this easily. My eeepc 701 for example wants a nice clean 9.5 v at 2.5 amps. Not happenin’ (yet)…

The really important thing to note here is we have just potentially made our robot self-sufficient. The robot base AND the laptop can now dock with the docking station and recharge their batteries whenever they see fit. You could easily make the “low battery” warning trigger the dock-seek subroutine, set it up on a schedule, whatever. Point is: our robot can now (potentially) function indefinitely without the need of a human to refuel it. Obviously it can’t wander off too far, or it won’t make it back to the docking station, but hey, big step here.

Of course, there is a really big drawback here as well: the laptop will suck power from the robot constantly. Which means less battery life for the robot. We’ll fix that in our next step…

The other thing to note here is we now have some nifty software! It’s not perfect, but it’s better than VNCing into the laptop and some other craziness. Pretty basic for now, but we’ll upgrade that later. It’s made in Python, which means it’ll run on pretty much anything with a little tweaking. It also means it can run a tad slow, but for now it works. Much expansion here in the next step too…

So tune in next time, you damn kids with your music…

Ok, so let’s say you wanna build some robots. Maybe you want something to automagically feed the dogs for you. Maybe you want something to fetch you a beer. Some sort of robo-butler, perhaps. Or maybe you’re looking at a world domination bid, whatever. Let’s build some robots.

Oh wait, all I know about robots come from movies and TV. That might be a problem. Better start small and simple. Crawl before you walk before you run and so on. How’s about a simple as hell, darn-near idiot proof, ultra-n00b’s guide to building your first robot?

Hell, why not… Read more