Robot Dialogs

I'm working on a second wooden puzzle box... It has taken forever to get the design right in Sketchup ( five six attempts)...trying to minimize the number of different components while only using a single type of wood... 1.1 inch x 0.2 inch trim. I'll keep taking pictures as I go and make another post later. This design is open source, go nuts. The Sketchup file is available here . I've gotten the design down to 21 different piece lengths. A bill of materials made using the CutList plugin for Sketchup is here . Final thought: I hate the lumber industry. If you say a piece of wood measures 1.25 by .25 inches, how the hell do you get off selling something not even close to that size? At what point did gross inaccuracy become okay?

I haven't done a proper project in a long while, and this past weekend it finally got to me. So I decided to try my hand making a prop/replica of the tuberous AI from Portal 2. I give you Potato GLaDOS : Most of it was sculpted from Sculpey and painted with acrylics. The audio comes from an old mp3 player I had lying around. The electronics consist of a LM386 audio amplifier, speaker, LEDs and a simple circuit to pulse the LEDs with the audio.  Here's a long winded explanation breakdown of how it was made . There's a boat-load of build pictures out on Flickr. The audio was pulled from here and spliced together in Audacity . Please support the developers and artists of these amazing games: Purchase Portal 2! And remember: "This. Sentence. Is. FALSE".

I started with pictures and models from the tubes. The image below is a particularly good example showing both sides. Model Reconstructed by ~ Zareste I went to the grocery store and found some models that I could hire for pennies an hour. I used Sculpey for the potato and GLaDOS, but I didn't want to bake it for four million years, and I needed a hollow inside for all the electronics so I made a potato-ish shape with aluminum foil. Keeping the outer layer of aluminum foil as smooth as possible will help when the foil is pulled out of the baked Sculpey. As you might expect potatoes are particularly easy to sculpt. Imperfections are the main feature...trying to keep fingerprints and fingernail marks out of the clay is the most difficult part of it. I don't have a picture, but the large hole (through which electronics are inserted) was cut out of the clay before it was baked. Scupley isn't too brittle after baking, but I didn't want to take a chanc...

Lately my projects have taken a back seat to some other higher priority stuff (including setting up the new web page for CCCKC (my local hackerspace) and various KC Maker Faire duties. On my own time I've been working to build a low power server. Something I can leave on all the time without burning holes in my wallet. Really that's just an excuse...any money I would have saved was dumped into good hardware and setup time, but whatever. I think the main point is that (when I've finished) I should have a server that I can leave on and have reliable file storage/access anywhere. And I will have learned something (supposedly). The Server: Mobo/Proc: SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPE-HF-D525-O   OS HD: OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (This server is my first build with an SSD...Fast!) RAM: Crucial 2x2GB CT2KIT25664BC1339 Raid 5 HDs: WD Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB Currently RMA-ing 2 of these...SMART errors Power Supply: Antec NEO ECO 520C Case: Antec 300 Best cases I've ever used...this i...

21.2 FPS! I'm borrowing a ChipKIT Max32 from a friend. Hooked it up to the long running GameBoy Classic LCD project I've been working on and after some optimized code I hit 21.2 FPS! Best result yet. I'm used a simple java program to generate a version of my AVR C code in optimized Processing (Arduino-ese). I had to un-roll loops to the point of absurdity that's why I started using code generation... Java code is here . Up on my plate in the near future: IOIO Tinkering - I need to come up with a project worthy of android powers. 30 Days of Creativity - June 1-30 - I'll be doing this again for sure! Maple Tinkering - I think this board might be the next step for the GameBoy Project. I have to return the ChipKIT Max32...the thing can only toggle an I/O pin at 719 kHz (I can get something better at the same price point). And most importantly the KC Maker Faire: June 25-26 :

I finally dug the GameBoy back out of the project box and started making some more progress on it. I'm still working with an ATMega32, but now I've cranked it up to the full 16Mhz it can handle... I also took some new data from the GameBoy LCD control signals with the Logic Sniffer. This time I wasn't clocking the GameBoy with my micro-controller. Instead I used the GBs original crystal, so the data is from the actual signals with actual timing that the GameBoy uses. I was able to break down the timings of the signals and essentially emulate them with the ATMega32. The logic I use to determine what pixel data to push out was simply if(x = y) then the pixel was turned on. I figure a diagonal line is a good test that doesn't look like the crazy vertical and horizontal screen artifacts you sometimes get with the GB. This picture is very deceiving, the contrast is a lot better in the picture than on the actual screen. The ATMega32 can't quite outpu...

Time for another post not about robots... Most projects are on the back burner because I've been poking about with an Ubuntu Server, Drupal and CiviCRM for CCCKC . I decided to make some coasters as a gift a family member. I went to Michaels to pick up the wood circle blanks, and Hobby Lobby had 4 inch cork coasters. I used one coat of stain before using the method I've described here to do the knot designs. This coat keeps the Sharpie ink from bleeding too much. When the designs were done I used 2 more coats of the stain and glued the wood disks to the cork coasters. Pictures taken with my EVO and the Droid Tripod Mount (yes it works with the EVO too!). I'm still on the fence about the Gorilla Glue. Hopefully it holds...I'm not sure I used enough. I tested one of them overnight with a puddle of water on the stained surface and it seemed to be sufficiently water proof.