I finally got around to ordering a new roll of solder. Yes, I bought leaded solder because screw brain cells, what have they ever done for me? What I find interesting enough to spend time writing this post about is that I purchased it from the same supplier as the […]
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Drawing my Pareidolia
So, I swear the original on the left looks more like a grumpy man in real life than it does in the photo, but anyway, that’s a photo of a piece of popcorn that’s been sitting on the floor mat of my car for the last week or so. I’ve […]
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Working on the Sonar Deck
I did a bit of work on the sonar deck for the robot. The first task after cutting out the boards was to solder the component pieces together. I use PCB material for the mechanical structure of the deck and include traces for electrical connections. The way it turns out […]
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This and That
Well, things have been going a bit slowly for a few days. I discovered that I very nearly made a huge mistake on the robot. I thought I would be able to shift the position of the bumpers upwards to clear the USB port of the Pico. That wasn’t actually […]
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Added the Bumpers
Today I spent all morning finishing off the bumpers for the new robot. I decided to try using acrylic for the actual bumpers, so the first task was to saw them out of the sheet. Fortunately the sheet had a bit that was the perfect size for the job, so […]
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Working on the Robot
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 […]
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Boards are Done
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 […]
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Fixed my Computer
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 […]
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I Did Another Numpad
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. […]