Robot Progress

I have the motors moving on my robot chassis. Granted, it is me giving the motors power directly and not using any form of computer control but at least i know the motors work. My earlier hypothesis about the motor control circuitry was false. The switching part of the original circuit doesn’t make any sense to me (though my electronics-fu is poor) so I decided to probe the motors themselves. Switching direction is as simple as switching polarity. This makes my homebrew controller more difficult to create so I have decided to use the motor controller shield for the arduino. Yeah, its not as hacky as I would have liked but it is better than me accidently frying something.

Tv-B-Gone glove

I have had a great idea (by my standards anyway). Those in the geek world should know about the tv-b-gone created by Mitch Aldman. It is designed to turn off about 90% of televisions with a single button press. My plan is to take that idea and turn it into a glove for fun and games.

Implementation

Take a glove, preferably fabric and one that you do not mind potentially destroying. Push the legs of an infrared LED through the tip of the index finger. Sew/solder some conductive thread to it and thread through the glove to the back of the palm. Do the same with a micro switch on the thumb. Hook the threads into a Lilypad Arduino and secure the Lilypad to the back of the glove.

Usage

Wear some sort of cloak to make yourself look like a monk or a Bedouin. Walk into a store that has a wall of TVs. Point at the TV wall with your index finger, say something about TVs being evil and covertly press your thumb against your index finger. TVs should turn off and send people running scared due to the scary cloaked figure manipulating technology in an unknown way.

The only difficulties I foresee is getting the codes to turn off televisions and getting arrested. Aside from that, I figure this should be very fun and educational.

I am a soldering god!

Well, not quite. Not even close. But I feel like one. I have fixed my HDD audio player (again) after I managed to break it (again).

I found that the solder pad for the right audio channel had come off a circuit board. I don’t believe that is easy to fix. So I did the next best thing. A blatant hackjob. I found some thin wire (yay for random cruft), cut it up and after much fiddling and a little guesswork, soldered it between the left and right pins on the audio connector, thus providing sound to both ears. Yay!

Hope it doesn’t break again.