So, I’m really sleepy right now. I didn’t sleep that well and then I spend all day working on my new robot. And then instead of keeping my head down, I decided to write this. I started with the metalwork for the front and rear bump sensors. That involved cutting […]

Yesterday I finished off most of the circuit boards for my new robot. I had to harvest some components from existing old circuit boards, notably the modular connectors I am using on the bumpers. The rest of the components were a mixture of new and old from various sources. To […]

I spent most of today making up the boards for my new robot and, oh boy! Maybe it’ll be fine. I started the day trying to figure out how to best use the space in the blank PCBs. The supplier didn’t have any of the stock I normally use, so […]

This was the state of my front IO connector PCB after I tripped over the USB cable, yeah not good. I figured I could make a replacement board, but before going that far I thought I’d try to repair the existing one. The first step was to glue the fragments […]

I couldn’t find out how to add a caption to the picture. [But now I figured it out …Ed.] I was fiddling with one of the old robot keypads and, same old story, thought I might like to upgrade the hardware so it could be used as a USB keypad. […]

I got to and did a bit more work on the keypad. Here you can see the inside of the keypad with the speaker switch in the top right corner of the case. It fitted nicely into the recess where the original keyboard’s legs would have been, so from the […]

I was rooting around in my box of goodies the other day when I came across this old keypad and thought why not get it working? It’s made from the numpad section of an old keyboard that I got when I cleared away all the old computers from a local […]

It looks pretty much like the old Spot X, but I just finished building this one. 12 years later. I’ve had the hardware bashing about in the shed for more than a decade, since I pulled apart most of my Spot 9 robots. On a whim I decided to build […]

This is what happened after trying to make some PCBs for my new robot. I had one blank PCB left from years ago and maybe just enough etchant to do the job, but things didn’t go to plan. I’d redesigned the front and rear bumpers so that the same design […]

After leaving Windows, I thought I’d need to keep a copy around as a VM for edge cases, like programming PICs. In fact I was resigned to not being able to continue PIC development. Then I discovered the difficulty the Pico has with some of my older hardware and I […]