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Hey all!  I haven't been to the site in a while, but I'm dropping by today to announce that I will be attending RoboGames 2009!  The event is from June 12-14 in San Francisco, and I'll be attending it on Saturday (the 13th).  Unfortunately I won't have time to build a sumo bot before the event, so I won't be competing this year.

I'll be checking out all the events, but I'd imagine the combat bots will be the most entertaining, so that's probably where I'll be for most of the day.

I recently assembled the Really Bare Bones Board, pictured below.  It's an Arduino clone in a smaller and more affordable package.

I watched this and was just like "what the random?!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNXb5effXI 

The Bare Bones Board is basically an Arduino without a USB connection.  It does all the same stuff as the Arduino, but it's way smaller and less than half the price ($15 unassembled).

http://moderndevice.com/ 

I was just wondering if anyone has any experience with this board, since I'm thinking about buying one.  I am reluctant to install my $35 Arduino Diecimila permanently into my robot, and I'd be much more comfortable using this $15 which I can just leave installed and not feel badly about.

I really want to get going on my robot but the parts haven't gotten here yet!  The shipment was supposed to arrive yesterday, and I contacted Solarbotics to see what the deal was.  They haven't gotten back to me yet.  Also, what the heck is the deal with the shipment tracking??  "Left" and "Arrived" without a location doesn't help me!

 

 Has anyone else had any problems with Solarbotics shipping before?

Last night I put together a quick demo sketch to test out my shiny new Parallax Ping, which I'll be equipping to my next robot.  I downloaded the code from arduino.cc and with my rusty C programming skills it was easy enough to convert it to a simple demo program that lights up an LED.  However, I make use of floating variables, and I was wondering if that slowed it down significantly enough to matter.  The program works like a champ, which I'm happy about, but I'm also one who likes code to be as optimized as possible.

I'm still very new to robotics, and there's no way I could just build a sumo robot right now.

But when I said I wanted to run a marathon a couple years ago, I wasn't a runner, and I just worked my way there slowly but surely, and finished the race.  Moral of the story; I'm much more motivated if I have goals.

Hehe ... funny stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QReFhqZUF9s