HR Geeks

Norfolk Technical Center is competing in this year’s US FIRST Robotics Challenge. A few HRGeeks members have been mentoring the students – assisting with software design / development, networking, and robot construction and electrical connections.
After 5 long weeks, the robot is moving under it’s own power, being remotely driven via joystick.

NTC FIRST Team’s Robot takes it’s ‘first’ steps! from HR Geeks on Vimeo.

Click through for a higher resolution view of the video.

If you’re local to the 757 (Southside would probably be best, but it’s up to you), shoot me an email if you’re interested in helping out a local group of high school kids in building their FIRST robot for competition. Work begins in January, for competition later in the spring.

1st place was taken at the 2009 Shmoocon Hacker Arcade for the skeebot modified skeeball machine! A conventional skeeball machine was upgraded. Features added include RFID authentication of the wooden balls, a 19″ widescreen LCD display, 1980 music videos, dollar and coin validation, 16.7 million color computer interfaced lighting, 750 watt strobe (also computer interfaced), seconardy LCD for digital ticket system (using USB port for thumbdrive), ground effects (also RGB LED based), and more! It was by far the largest, and technically only entry at this years arcade. Thanks to David of Outer Banks Amuseuments for the machine. The machine was given to Bruce & Heidi of the Shmoogroup (minus most electronics). We hope to see it in the future modified in all new ways. We’ve already got a list of new ideas for next year’s hacker arcade.

Eventually all source code and docs will be posted under skeebot at www.757labs.com. Video was also recorded to make a short video about the project.

Thanks to Remad and Enferex for much help in transportation, testing, and setting it up! Enferex wrote some code for a web component that unfortunately wasn’t finished. It might find it’s way into a future project though!

I know, one mans old 486 is another man’s firewall or router, but there is a point at which it really is time to get rid of those old electronics sitting around, and that time is quickly approaching.

It’s time for the annual Keep Norfolk Beautiful Electronics Recycling Day, April 19th. Keep Norfolk Beautiful assists residents yearly with disposing of their electronic goods which can be nasty little time bombs in landfills.

For a while I’ve been talking about using a really neat standalone injection system on one of my cars. The system I’ve been looking at for a good while is called MegaSquirt developed by Bowling and Grippo. The hardware is built around a Motorola MC9S12C64 microcontroller on a custom PCB. If you are inclined, you can even just buy the PCB and buy all the parts from mouser to build it yourself or for the rest of us there are a few places online that will sell you a completed kit ready to go. Some of the early code was written in assembly, but the more modern programs are all written in c.

For those not familiar, in a gasoline engine the ratio of air to fuel that gets burned in the engine is critical for both engine health and performance. Too little fuel and you can risk damaging the engine, too much fuel and you lose power and waste fuel. The fuel injection system is responsible for determining the amount of air entering the system and providing the appropriate amount of fuel for proper combustion. In many cases the same system is also responsible for correctly timing the spark that ignites the air and fuel mixture.

MegaSquirt is ideal for people looking to shed their old carburetors or mechanical fuel injections systems and update to modern electronic fuel injection (assuming they have the expertise and free time). It’s also an excellent choice for DIY tuners if you want to spend the time (and dyno runs) to squeeze every last horsey out of a motor.  Similar commercially built systems are available but most of them cost several thousands of dollars, whereas a fully assembled MegaSquirt unit can be had for around $300.

I’m going to be undertaking this project on my 1983 Volvo 240 Turbo (If Telmnstr will let me maybe I’ll try to get it on 757labs) but I’m looking to maybe get some of the car and computer nerds together on this one as there are a lot of things that have to be right before the car will even start. Things like calibrating all of the sensors, building a wiring harness, some machine work for various trigger wheels, programming maps and tables into the computer etc.  If anyone wants to get involved shoot me an e-mail.

Okay, sure I could have purchased the 50-Piece resistor assortment pack from Radio shack for $6, but why bother when you can goto China and eBay and for $25 get 2500 resistors.

I will never go wanting again.

This place might join my list of favorite China direct companies Sun-Pec.

My others include:

LED Shoppe

Cell Phone Shop

Who do you use for China-direct stuff other than China-Mart, err.. Wal-Mart.