The Stairs - You use them to get from one floor of the house to the other.

Before

More of the delightful patterned carpet.

And nicotine-stained walls

After

Nice coat of paint , a new carpet, a bit of wallpaper, and removing all old person banisters, and we have a nice new set of stairs

Here is the most important room of the house, the place I sleep!

Before:

That woodwork used to be white, a smoker lived here for a long time

Note the delightful curtains.

What you can’t see in these pictures is all the ash in the fireplace, someone had been using it recntly, even though it had carpet going right under it!

After:

That isnt a stain on the wallpaper, it appears there was some dust on my lens (that or my house is FULL of orbs)

So, the lounge is now mostly finished, time for some before and after shots!

Before:

The carpet smelled of cat pee

Note the delightful nicotine stain on the wall where there used to be a dresser.

I’m still not sure why i bought the house looking like this!

After:

Still need to hang that mirror, get rid of those boxes, and tidy up the wires for my orbs.

TV will be wall mounted above the table, and my 360, Xbox & Wii will sit on the shelf.

Hopefully this should be done this week

I’m not sure why it is, but even though i know exactly how it works, the contents of this video terrify me.

Hopefully i’ll be able to have a play with this stuff myself once i have some free time.

Phew, back online, after the server crashed horribly last weekend!  Good job i could get enough access to log in and grab a swift backup before it stopped booting completely.

In other news, doing up a house takes AGES!  I don’t think I’ve had a weekend or an evening for a month now!

I’ll be posting a full log of the work we’ve done to it next week, and some taster shots later today, keep an eye out for them.

So, it was time for RoboTIC 07, and… I’d done nothing with R1v2 since June!

Since the only huge hardware problem i’d been having was with the sensor board, I decided it was time to rebuild it from scratch, and move to a more technologically advanced sensor, so… i shamelessly copied from Min4A, one of the top Singaporean mice.

So, i had decided on using the TSL262, now the problem was to find them! The only place they seem to be available in the UK, farnell, sells them for £3 each in small quantities (pn: 1182351), and since i could find them for $2.52 (about £1.25) each from Mouser in the US (pn: 856-TSL262R-LF), i decided to import a pile of them, and resell what i didn’t need. After perusing the datasheet, i found a good matching Infra Red LED (pn: 859-LTE-209), and put in an order for 50 pairs.

A week later they arrived, along with a nice customs bill, so including delivery, they cost about £2 each, still 1/3 cheaper than it would have been buying locally.

After some planning, and trying different methods of coupling the TSL262 to my ATMega32 uC, i decided to go for simplicity, and coupled the output of my test sensor directly to an ADC. The LED was connected to an IO pin set to output, and tied to ground via a 330Ω resistor.

It gave much more repeatable results than the old sensors, between 5/1024 for no wall at all, and 50+/1024 when there is a wall nearby. Since it seemed to work as expected, with no major glitches, So i moved onto a small stripboard sensor.

This sensor was tested by being plugged into the sensor board plug. Once i had it working, I soldered a sensor board connector to a second piece of stripboard sized to fit in the sensor board slot at the front of the mouse.

Once tested, I built another of the sensors, and attached both to the front and rear of the left side of the micromouse using sticky foam pads, and built a third sensor on the sensor interface board.

So, the hardware of R1v2 is now complete!

Come back soon, when i’ll be walking through the toolchain used to program the mouse, and release the full schematics of the mouse.

I’ve been looking for a while now for a small, light, cheap laptop that i could convert into a solid state machine by way of a compactflash - IDE adapter. After wading through countless ebay auctions of 300mhz machines for £200, I had basically given up… Until Sunday.

You see, on Sunday, someone mentioned the Asus eee pc to me in a conversation, saying how it was thin, light, and cheap… And it sounded perfect. So, come Monday i hit Google and found some reviews, saw a takeapart guide, found out it was completely solid state, and ran a customized version of Xandros Linux.

It sounded perfect, if only i could find somewhere that sold it! I quickly hit up RM, the official UK distributor, to find that their price was £240 including vat and delivery. One problem though, they’re not selling them until the 16th! So, i head back to Google, and find that eBuyer have them for £220 including VAT. Out of stock again… but they have a black version in stock! I hit buy quickly, before that little bit of sanity I have left comes back to tell me not to, and tack on next day delivery, because the insane part of my brain is also impatient.

It arrived Tuesday morning, and I immediately set about getting rid of Xandros, and replacing it with the glory that is Ubuntu Gutsy. Easy enough, the basic install worked from a USB DVD drive as it would on any other PC.

Once i had the OS installed, it was time for customization and optimization. Step 1 was to get the wireless working. Easy as hell with ndiswrapper from the Gutsy install DVD, and the windows driver from the eee driver disk.  Once that was set up, i could connect easily to WPA networks through nm-applet, and run an update. After that i set /tmp and /var/log to run from tmpfs RAM drives, and

My eee has been running along nicely now for 3 days, Unknowing of the horror i am soon going to unleash on it with a soldering iron, and some USB devices…

Tune in soon to see what happens…