It's alive!

And I've named him Marvin. It's 8k brain is a bit smaller than a planet, though..


After a couple of hours of soldering (and checking resistors - there are a few mistakes in the manual, so you won't get far without a multimeter) it's finished :).
On powering on only one problem surfaced: I had inverted the wires for one of the motors.. but that was easily fixed.

I made a few modifications to the original manual, though: I've used double-sided tape to fix the motors, and some of those twistable cable ties (unlike the provided tie-wraps, these are easy to re-use: a nice advantage when you want to change batteries).

I did send my first Hello World-program trough the IR-transciever, so that works as well.

Tomorrow: real programming :).

Asuro?

Asuro is a cute little robot building kit. According to the box, it's a:

• Complete kit including software and a table tennis ball

which saves the fuss of delving up a table tennis ball somewhere to use as front wheel/slide.
Actually, it's a complete robot, with:

• 2 small motors to separately drive the back wheels
• 6 touch sensors ("Hey, this is a wall! Let's turn back around and see what's around there! Oh, another wall!!")
• 2 light sensors mounted at the bottom, very usefull for following a line (guess what our assignment is...)
• 2 rotation sensors (read: also light sensors, the rotation bit we'll have to program ourselves)
• And the coolest bit: IR communication features! I am so going to make this talk with my Palm :).

Programmable in C (or whatever language you can find a compiler for), flashable trough the IR port (how cool is that?), and with half a Christmas tree in status LEDs it'll give away a decent disco show as well.

Linky: the website of the people who designed it.

revive(blog);

So, Animal Crossing wasn't really as fun as I hoped it'd be (and/or I didn't have enough time/energy to actively participate in my new second life as inhabitant of a cute, tiny little seaside village).

New project to blog about: Asuro. More info coming soon.