arduino, robots, cameras, and life

Last night I built two Freeduino Bare Bones Boards. I had two kits. One was from Moderndevice, and one was from MAKE. They were essentially the same kit, but different versions. There was one resistor difference I believe. The first kit took me quite a while to put together – probably about an hour. The second kit took about half of that. They were really quite straightforward. Put the parts in in the order they suggest and solder them up. You could even put them in in the wrong order – it would just make holding them in the board while you flip it over harder.

There were two sticking points in the instructions – (1) they say you need 4 of the small caps and they give you 5. You really need all five. (2) for some reason I read the debugging instructions at the end to say “troubleshoot if the light doesn’t turn off” as opposed to “if the light doesn’t turn on”

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I have always been interested in Lego NXT. It seems like a really easy way to get into robotics, and programming. I have never really figured out how functional it is in the “real world” (whatever that means)
The other day a coworker was really pushing the idea on me telling me I needed to buy a kit because it was so easy to build things. Now I really struggle with the arduino most of the time, but I enjoy the struggle, and I know that if I ultimately build something then I can replicate it fairly cheaply. That is my issue with NXT. It is REALLY expensive. It is expensive for legos, it is expensive for a microprocessor, and it is expensive for the peripherals. I think I’m past the target age of these things, but regardless, I priced out how much it would cost for me to “replicate” an NXT kit with and arduino.

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so in the last lil’ bit I have not been blogging at all. Happily that has been because I’ve been swamped with projects, vacation, and work. Now I’ve got a big old backlog of updates on everything. Here we go!

Grow your own shiitake mushroom log

My beautiful girlfriend gave me a kit two years ago that I finally got around to working on. The ‘kit’ is a log impregnated with mushroom spores. The directions say to soak it under water for 24 hours, “Thump both ends on the floor”, and then to let it sit in a shallow pan of water till the buds start poppin!

I did all of those steps and it kind of looks like I have a moldy log to show for it. Now I’m no mycelologist (best guess at that one!) but I guess mold and mushrooms could be distant relatives. The directions say that buds should appear within 2-5 days. Well, i guess that stretches the definition of buds, but I’ll roll with it.
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