Should of Known

My new soldering iron broke today, 10 minutes after plugging it in...

I guess that's what you get when you walk into a sketchy electronics store straight from the 80s and say, "Can I see your cheapest soldering iron?"

Shoulda' known.

Sweaters are Great...Most of the Time

The ESB is coming along nicely. I found a way to get it to play tracks from an ipod by stealing some electronics parts from a ipod playing pillow. Yay scavenging!

Some funky stuff was going on with the electronics though...like how it was playing radio and ipod at the same time...

I enjoyed hearing classical 89 talk about Imagines Dragons' "composing and piano concerto skills" though.

Eventually I discovered (at least I think) the source of the problem:

My wool sweater!

Sweaters are pretty great, but I should probably shed them while I work on electronics....sorry Evil Santa Bot.

Santa Claus is Coming to Town...Beware.

This week I went to DI thinking I could find cheap electronics stuff I could tinker with. (It turns out I was right, it's perfect for an aspiring hardware hacker like me!)

Anyways I found among other things a one foot high little Santa toy that's supposed to dance and sing when you squeeze his arm.

But come Halloween I plan to have transformed him into the E.S.B. (Evil Santa Bot) Mwahahaha!

If you're naughty he won't just give you a fistful of coal, but a fistful of DEATH!
...actually he won't, I'm not quite that skilled at robotics yet.

But I do plan to make him as creepy as possible, complete with glowing red eyes, a disturbing soundtrack, and mighty boots of doom, and if I can get it to work, singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in minor key.

Pictures and/or videos are upcoming so be ready. And check under your bed for the Caliph of Christmas.

What Can I Say? The Kids Love Him.

    Hal, (the BYU Mars Rover) may sometimes ignore our commands and/or try to kill us. But he sure is good with the kids.

This was up at the Salt Lake City Maker Fair. The team decided to take Hal up and have some fun showing him off. Turned out the kids really adored him.

Even when he chased them with his raised like a scorpion sting. They screamed in terror.
But it was gleeful terror.

They especially loved feeding him french fries and bouncy balls. "Bad Hal! You're already 15 Kilos over the competition weight limit!"

It was so much fun controlling Hal and playing with the kids though. I got to control this little puppet arm that controls Hal's arm and interact with the kids. His movements were so fluid it was easy to forget that we were the ones controlling him. It was almost like a "man behind the curtain" moment for some of the kids who realized it.

Robotics has such an interesting aspect that not only can they be so crazily advanced and complicated and hard to, but they can also be insanely fun. I've never seen a kid get so excited over any other high technology machine.

And Hal wasn't even built to make kids laugh. He was just built to bring packages to stranded astronauts and clean solar panels.

Anyways we'll be making and releasing a video of a day in the life of Hal sometime soon so keep your eye out for it!

Too Excited

So after deciding robotics really was what I wanted to get into I started looking around for robotics clubs or projects going on at BYU I could join, but I couldn't find one anywhere. It was really puzzling to me since BYU has such a great engineering program.

But then a few days ago my brother Patrick mentioned a whisper in the machine shop, a nameless secret he had heard (except not really, they just don't advertise much.) It was the BYU Mars Rover Project!

Basically a bunch of Universities build mars rover-like robots that compete in a bunch of challenge at the Mars Desert Research Station down in southern Utah. It's pretty dang sweet. 

Actually I was surprised that I couldn't find it earlier, it has its own website. 

http://marsrover.byu.edu/ 

Though not very up to date.

And it's own Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYU_Mars_Rover 

So I came to the meeting and I'm joined!

Basically right now I'm just a machine shop lackie, but it's an opportunity to learn so much!

I might be a little too excited about it, but hey I love this kind of stuff. 

A Passion is Born

When I was writing my college essays, I kept being told I needed to make them about "my passion" It was really hard. I pretty much loved everything, but there wasn't really anything I was passionate about. It really stressed me out. That's steadily changing though thanks to this guy.

Meet my creation/pal/son/room-mate,

Jeffrey

Even though we've only known each other for a few days we're pretty much best friends.

When he made his first wheel rotations it made me the proudest mad scientist in the world. He was a little wobbly at first, but he's getting better everyday.

Sometimes he gets on my nerves, but it's okay because I can just take out his batteries. I can't get too mad at him though, seeing how I'm the one that programs him.

He's got some issues with authority. It took me almost two hours to try to get him to listen to his PC overlord, but he gave in eventually. I admire that fighting spirit. He might be helpful in any tussles with advanced AI that turn against me in a violent robot rebellion. 

But most of all Jeffrey is making me realize more and more how much I really love robotics. I can't help but think about it every day throughout the day. I think I've found my calling.