tir38

Oh! I’m so excited I can’t wait! Christmas presents are all wrapped and ready to go out. Will Santa be stopping by your house this week? You’ll just have to wait and see. For now, a peak at his workshop:

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Every time I go home for Thanksgiving, I discover some new artifact from my childhood. This time, it was a video that my friend, brother, and I made sometime when we were probably 11 or 12. I remember our family had a big bulky personal camcorder that had a stop-motion feature. It looked something like this:

Basically, you pushed a button and the camera took a short clip. We then moved the figures and pushed the button again. As with most things we did as kids, this was completely improvised. We also started experimenting by manually lengthening the clips and this allowed us to use a G.I. Joe toy to add sound effects. Its no Robot Chicken but we probably had fun making it.

So in the course of finishing what would have been part 3 of this project, the post processing, I decided that some design changes needed to be made to the robot. I made two hardware changes: larger drive wheels and the addition of a compass sensor.

Side view.
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Now that its October and I’m on to my post-season beer and laziness celebration, I should recap this year’s cycling adventures. After a successful year of track racing last year and taking a cue from my friend Chris Kelly, I made a list of goals for this year:

- Compete in Wednesday night racing at Dick Lane Velodrome, not missing more than three nights.
- Compete in all three Pro Race Series events at Dick Lane Velodrome and win points in one event.
- Mountain bike as often as possible.
- Use road riding as a training tool; don’t get frustrated about performance.
- Win the Faster Mustache 24 Hour Race, with team Dreadnok.
- Compete in the cyclocross season, for fun.
- Don’t get out of shape in the winter.

Second Pro Race Series. Photo by Chris Kelly
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Since transitioning to Ubuntu Linux, I’ve continued working on my Lego NXT projects. I spent several hours figuring out how to configure my machine to write, debug, and upload code to the NXT brick. I found several sites and message board posts, each detailing a specific step in the process. I thought it would be a good idea to bring all of this information together and hopefully make it easy for anyone else who wishes to follow in my footsteps.

The entire process consists of setting up a Windows emulator (WINE), installing an IDE (BricxCC), and installing and running a communications tool between linux and the brick (Talk2NXT).

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