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…

Here is my new watch, bought duty free in jamaica. Its a Seiko SKA235 Kinetic Watch, Has a sexeh window in the back to view the mechanism, and should hopefully never need a replacement battery!

Heres some pics:

Life’s a Beach…

I’ve just managed to get the sensors working in r1v2, thought it was time to update the worklog.

Sensors outputting:

Sensor input:

Sensor1 (front left): 49
Sensor2 (front right): 27
Sensor3 (left) : 25
Sensor4 (right): 26

Unfortunately, the sensor input doesnt seem too useful at the moment, as i’m getting either a lot of noise, or too little variance between the nearby and far away readings.

Woooooooo

So, i graduated!

Bob Clough BSc (hons)

Also, my new mug arrived:

I dont know which i’m more excited about.

Today i managed to get the motors on R1v2 working properly. I also added a second LED, and wired up the rest of the header for the sensors.

Here is a short video of it running the motors on opposite directions. Tonight I’m looking at getting them working with timers and interrupts, reusing the code i wrote earlier:

Today i finished the board for R1v2. I added two status LEDs to the power lines, one for 5v and one for 3.3v.

Also, i added the header for ICP, a RS232 header, a pair of switches, the header for the sensor board, a uC controlled LED and a hex input switch.

After the hardware was completed, I programmed a quick piece of software to allow me to read the status of the hex switch, and toggle the LED over the RS232 link.

So tomorrow the plan is to get the stepper motors running, using interrupts in the uC.

Due to some last-minute hacking trying to fix rooter’s boards the day before my dissertation demo, and some really really bad connections in between the different boards, I’m now rebuilding and replacing most of the boards. I have decided to keep the regulator board and possibly the sensor board, but everything else on v2 is going on a single piece of stripboard.

This allows me to do away with one of the microcontrollers, and the (very troublesome) connection in between the main board and stepper driver board, and should hopefully leave me with a working mouse!

Here are some WIP pictures from tonight:

I’ll be posting more pictures tomorrow, and a report from the UK MicroMouse Championships at the weekend!