Asus Eee 900

Hooray! Despite making me jump through a few hoops to verify my identity, Dabs came through and delivered my Eee 900 today. I'm posting from it right now - the keyboard will take a bit of getting used to but it's a lot easier to type on than my previous UMPC. It'd be hard to give a negative review to something I've just spent 330 quid on but it is very good so far. It's a lot better built than I'd been expecting - it may look like a toy but it's very solid. Next step - apt-get emacs and pygame.

Toaster video

I've been playing with my digital camera, trying to make a better video for the turbo toaster. The results aren't perfect, but still better than I expected for about an hour's work. The title and fade in was done with Kdenlive, which I found really easy to use. Pity that it doesn't seem to anti-alias the text properly when fading to the video clip. I brought up the colour a bit using mencoder with a few filter options. Anyway, there you go, flying toast in full motion video.

From the archives

I've uploaded a few of my older posts from my wordpress installation - the LED message board modifications, the event report from Robot Wars 2003, and the Turbo toaster.

Load Average Meter

I found this old milliameter in Empire Exchange in Manchester. It was built sometime in the 1960s. I then printed out a new scale for load average, turned the original scale plate around and glued my new scale onto the back, so as not to ruin the original one.

I've used a USB interface board from Maplin to drive it. The interface board has open collector PWM inputs, but the meter needs a bit more power than the board can supply - about 100mA on its smallest scale to go full scale. To get power, I've drawn off a drive power connector from the motherboard. The last component is a small perl script that does a bit of maths to convert the computer's current load average into a duty cycle.

Moving from Wordpress

While I'm very impressed with Wordpress, maintaining my own installation is taking up a bit more time than I'd like. I don't write posts very often and Wordpress seem to come out with a new version more often than I blog. I've decided to move over to Blogger so Google can take care of the service. I'll either write a script to keep them in sync or move srimech.com over to a republishing system.

MUTR Micro rover

I found this little tracked robot platform at mutr.co.uk. It's quite difficult to find tracked robot platforms (or even the components) cheaply, but this is very nice for the ~ ten pounds they charge. It contains the tracks, wheels, motors and gearboxes, an aluminium plate for the chassis, fixing screws and some three-way switches and wire. It needs a bit more than just assembly to get it moving - I had to fold and drill the aluminium and glue some of the wheels together, and I found the motor tended to rise out of the gearbox if I didn't tie it down with some copper wire.

Somewhere I have some infra-red proximity sensors and a camera board I'd like to attach to it to make it into a proper robot. It'll need a suitable battery and some motor controllers - the Electronize controllers I have at the moment are a bit too big for it.

MUTR sell a lot of useful stuff - I got some Nitinol memory wire at the same time, which is very interesting stuff. Their £5.80 default delivery charge is a bit annoying for small orders, but handily I have some colleagues who also buy from there to share costs with.

ZX Spectrum Laptop

I've been working on this for quite a while. It's one of them 'casemods' that all the kids are talking about - the mind and display of a Libretto in the body of a ZX Spectrum. More details / more pictures