I'm starting to look forward now to the Maker Faire in Newcastle in mid-March. I need to get a few things fixed up, like the Compukit UK101, to take along. I also need to make a couple of things pretty much from scratch, to take along and see if they generate enough interest that I could make them into products ( Read more... )

Started the job today. Got nothing much done, 'cos the network ports in my cell cubicle aren't working yet. I did get fitted with the usual ball and chain ID badge, though. In fact, we had three new starters on one day, which isn't bad for a recession, I suppose ( Read more... )

Today, with lots of help from aminorjourney, I made a start at getting the City-El electric bubblecar back on the road. The main problem is, of course, batteries. But I was given two sets of batteries a little while ago, and I really hadn't done much with them. One set (three 12V to make 36V nominally) is Optima Yellow-Tops, and the other is sealed gel-cells ( Read more... )

I've been working on the little rotary encoder gadget that I took along to last month's Dorkbot Bristol. It's a CD-ROM hub/motor, stripped out of a broken drive and repurposed. I've wired up the three hall-effect sensors to give a signal that represents the rotation of the hub, and connected it all to an Atmel AVR ATmega8 microcontroller. I've ( Read more... )

This weekend was LUG weekend again. I took the Slackware laptop along again, and successfully connected up to the WiFi network at the pub. I borrowed the User Friendly cartoon books, and was also loaned a toy radio-controlled car chassis that could make the basis for a small robot. It has differential steering (tank-like), although it has four ( Read more... )

Time to test the Atmel AVR board. I have a few assembler programs ready to go, but since I last messed about with the AVR chips, I must've changed something. Either I upgraded, or I moved the source code into a different directory, or something. And now the "Build" icon in the Integrated Development Environment is greyed out. No error message, ( Read more... )