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A very slightly used, never competed Solarbotics Mini Sumovore Kit. |
My LEGO Robotics, DIY Hacks and other stuff
When I bought this, I purchased the sumovore kit, the stamp stack microcontroller as well as the brainboard as I thought I needed all of them. I assembled the Sumovore, programmed and tested it and it works fine, but it has been sitting on a shelf for months not getting any use. So, it’s time for it to go. I am selling all three items below as a package. Total cost was about $180 USD with shipping, customs duty/taxes etc. Details as follows:At some point I would like to use solar energy to supplement our home power usage. 
Of course I was not going to jump into a full-out solar power array on my roof and out myself thousands of dollars without fully knowing the risks and potentials of photovoltaic solar power in my area. Instead, I decided on a proof-of-concept project – a small 10Watt 12V solar charger.
So, since I find myself constantly taking things apart because they are broken, 
needing repair and cleaning, I figured why not post about them on my blog! Surely someone out there will take on the same task at some point in time. That said, here is a DIY cleaning for the Microsoft wireless notebook laser mouse 6000.
I’ve cleaned out the closet and found a number of items that I have put up for sale. Check it out.
Welcome to my new blog. I was beginning to tire of my old site and 
found that I needed a better way to manage the content of my projects as I diversify my portfolio of LEGO robotics, electronics work, mods, instructables and other hacks.
Over the years I have had many great comments and questions primarily related to my LEGO robots. When I did my Apple MightyMouse mod to my Asus EEE 901 (which I am typing this on right now), I decided to post instructions to my site. Well, I managed to get picked up by a number of blogs around the world and received a huge response. This has driven me to document more of my hobby projects here.
My hope is to share as much information as possible about LEGO and other DIY projects that I create. I hope that you enjoy the site and please use the ratings and provide comments as I would like to know what people like and dislike.
Dave
What: Hack the innards of an Apple Mighty Mouse into an EEE 901.
Why: I found the 2-finger scrolling using the touchpad a PINTA. So, since it’s never my intent to leave well enough alone, and I was itching for something to take apart and hack, I decided to integrate a trackball into my EEE 901. The Apple Mighty Mouse was the best candidate becase the trackball acts like a wheel on the mouse – I can use it solely for scrolling rapidly through pages of content. Of course, there are out there, but its ball acts as a mouse controller (not for scrolling) and I didn’t want to pay the price. I figured the Mighty Mouse would be more of a challenge anyhow. Well, it was. Read on for details, a video, and instructions…
How Much: $22 USD (the mouse)
Update: Jan 2010 -
There have been a number of blogs and forums that have picked up this DIY, which is nice to see. There have also been a number of posts that share similar themes that either point to the Mighty Mouse being trash, or questions as to why would someone want to do this hack when the EEE already has two finger scrolling on the trackpad. To answer the quality question – the trackball has been installed since July 09. 6 months later (and counting), it’s still working as good as it did when I first installed it. No crud, skips, etc etc. To answer the ‘whatever floats your boat’ question, I guess its just that. I like to hack and DIY things – never satisfied with status-quo. As noted in this post, I dont like the 2 finger scrolling. While some consider these things an effort, others (like myself) consider them fun and challenging. I just find it funny when reading some of the responses out there as they either seem to be arrogant of the concept of DIY, or just like to get their post counts up 
. Thanks to those of you who can appreciate the hobby of DIY.
April 2007:
What better way to test a colour sensor then to create a brick sorting robot! After getting my hands on a HiTechnic colour sensor, I first took a stab at creating a robot that could navigate a room and detect colour. There was only one problem, it could not really do what I was hoping for. I was nieve in thinking that I could build this robot and it could detect colours from a distance. After reading the fine print on the provided documentation, I quickly realized that the colour sensor is only capable of reading colours at very close range (~ 1 cm). My bad. Of course, you could still build a robot that uses the ultrasonic or other sensor to get it close to objects, then read the colour… but that’s for another time.
BrickSorter uses this colour sensor to detect the colour of bricks and sort them into a variety of cups. The program is quite simple, gravity and studless beams allow for each brick to slide down the track on its own. when a brick is next, the colour sensor takes a reading (more on this later), the sort motor turns the sort rails to the correct cup, the sort rail motor changes its angle depending if the cup is close or far and finally the kicker motor kicks the brick in motion.
After a lot of fooling around with the cup placement (which seemed to be the hardest part of this project!), I managed to get the sorting pretty much bang on. Of course, the video shows some goofs, but that is mostly due to the small sized cups (its all I had!)… Anyway, I found the sensor to be accurate most of the time, but ambient light still influenced the readings at times and caused for the odd random missorting of a brick. I had to shoot the video about 10 times to get cup placement and sorting goofs worked out.
April 2007:
Your first question is probably “what does UNV stand for?”. Well, its nothing special – I simply could not come up with a name for it, so what better way to tag it then simply unnamed vehicle. After receiving a bunch of the new tread links, I wanted to create something grand with them. Scouting the web, I came across these multi-purpose robots (see below) that can be outfitted for police / bomb squad use, or for scientific work. Thought they looked pretty cool, so they were the inspiration. UNV was sitting around for months before I finally got around to taking pictures and a video of it. Read on for details…
Jan 2008:
WifiCamBot was one of my adventures in building a robot that could be remotely driven around while transmitting video via a live feed through an IP-based network camera wirelessly.
The idea came from my wanting to do something simple. Survey underneath my deck to see what sort of critters etc were making a home there. The deck was high enough for a rover-like vehicle to fit and drive around. I did not want to have wires tethered to the system, so I used a Panasonic BL-C30 WiFi camera with a built-in webservr to transmit live video via the web.
In this case, I have a webserver where I created a subdomain specifically for the camera to broadcast its info to. Loaded the Java components to receive the streaming video and render it on the site. The site also allows for remote control of the camera via WiFi. So, the entire robot, power and electronics are all onboard. There were a few challenges with this approach. 1) Power – The Wifi camera required 12 volts dedicated power. I did this by wiring 2 battery packs together in series (required a custom modified motor wire). This also added a fair bit of weight to the robot. In total there are 2 battery packs for the WifiCam and 1 for the PowerFunctions motors. That is 18 AA batteries. No worries though – the PF motors still have lots of torque.