Apr 222013
Apr 222013
Lovely Bugatti in the Bentley Garage
My Dewalt Goggles to stop a repeat of “The Creosote soaked sawdust in eye Incident”
A Little Bunny called Peter (a Present for Sarah)
A Room for my Ultimate Creation
Some Home made Cider, it’s now matured for a month and tastes epic!
Leigh helping a Mummy Printer have a little Baby Printer
Apr 022013
The Garage Studio is now carpeted, much warmer!
Feb 262013
It’s about time, that’s all I’ll say.
I feel like I’ve been wasting my time using anything other than the Galaxy S3.
So much faster, slicker and graphically better than anything else.
Anyway, watching Terminator and the theme tune tune has just started
Dec 162012
I’ve bought a Raspberry Pi for about £30 from Amazon and a Pololu Maestro 6-Channel USB Servo Controller. I haven’t decided what I’m building yet but I figured once I get it and have a play, I can work out what it can be used for and start from there.
I used to play around with robotics when I was little and found the electronics easy but the computer side more challenging. I’m pretty sure that should no longer be the case. The hardware is now so much more advanced and cheaper. I think my STAMP PIC based PCB was something like £100 and had a limit of about 2000 lines of memory. This meant if you wanted to do more advanced stuff you would have to have a separate chip for different jobs (sub it out) I’m sure with 512MB Ram and 8GB of Storage this shouldn’t be a boundary any more.
After watching shows like Prototype this I keep thinking, shall I get back into it?
I’ve got all sorts of things that could be controlled by servos, like the throttle for a 100cc 4-stroke Engine (might scrap that idea, could cause damage to my house when it breaks) Might end up getting some big MOSFETs (are they still called that?), build a motor controller and get a couple of wheelchair motors instead.
I’ve installed Raspbian to an 8GB SD card, fitted a wireless dongle and turned on SSH, now i’m geeking from the comfort of my sofa with my Macbook. As for the Servo controller, that’s connected to the Pi’s USB, has a servo connected and I soldered a 2-pin PCB connector onto a 5V AC-DC adaptor for power.
Just installing the USB Virtual Serial drivers on the Pi and I should be able to started programming to see how easy this task will be.
It’s all sat on a carling box at the moment and relies on AC power but I’ll screw a few motherboard risers into a piece of acrylic when I can get into my shed and mount the PCBs on there. I’ve got a 5000mAH L-ion 5V mobile phone extender thing coming. This will deliver the 2A of power required to power both The Pi and Servo PCBs along with a few servos, should give my robot a few hours of battery life and allow me to charge using my Phone’s USB charger.
Geek-Tastic