A Million Useless Thoughts

Finally decided that the robots current name is Cog. I was debating this because of all of the other Cogs out there, but finally decided that because of the steam punk influence in design that it would be a fitting name. Progress so far on Cog: Constructed that ARM kit: It runs on 5 3V DC motors. Which is fine, I have something to play with for figuring out the mechanic. In the mean time, I am attempting to wire to an older version of a IO control board we make at work to control the motors. May need to add some relays to make it work, and will be using 5V instead of 3V, but the motors should be fine. Wii Mote: Utilized GlovePIE and PPJoy to create joystick control for the left and right motors. The current software works perfectly, but needs to be scripted a bit and need to update the hardware to make some of the debugging a little easier. There is a needed box re-design coming anyway. It is fun to drive around and I need to post a video of it, but I want to post both a vi...

The two active brain cells are giggling now. No time to blog, time to build!

Starting thinking about how to learn new things and found that nothing really beat kids toys for getting started on how to learn. However, it took a bit to overcome the stigma of they're kids toys. Kids toys have many things going for them over more adult how-to videos and projects. First they tend to be safer, nothing like learning on how things go together then plastic bits that break on your skin rather than sharp metal bit covered in red blood. Second they much more colorful than brown or gray. No idea who thought the world should be gray, but bright color are much easy to find when looking for new bits. And finally they are far more hands on-discovery than a how-to video. When books and video there's still the fine tuning that needs to be learned by doing. The toys have this built in to some degree. Why was I thinking about this? Well, I only somewhat understand the mechanics behind a multi-motor robotic arm, so I decided to order the cheapest I could find. It wa...