It might sound like a stupid question, but in designing my first robot I've fallen at the first hurdle. I loved the look of the hexapod/spiderbot robots but thought this a little ambitious for my first effort, so decided to stick to a wheeled/tracked 'bot.
Wheels or tracks? Well, I've no plans on going off-roading, so tracks seem to add an unnecessary layer of complexity, so wheels it is. But how many?
Two is obviously simple, with a third, non-powered castor for stability. But more and more I like the look of the three wheeled omnibot.
Just think about that for a minute. Three wheels - arranged in a triangle.
At first, it seems like a stupid idea because two driven wheels will always be dragging the third wheel. And dragging equals resistance which equals extra (unnecessary) load on the motors which means shorter battery life. That is until you've seen how a transwheel works.

These clever little wheel has a series of rollers running perpendicular to the axle around the outside, allowing it to be moved in any direction as well as to provide drive like a "normal" wheel.
So you can have three wheels all at 60 degrees to each other and by changing the speed of rotation on each wheel, have a robot move in any direction without turning to face that direction. Some of the cool kids call it "strafing".

So should I have a simple two-wheeled robot, which is easy to understand and drive? Or a three-wheeled robot which would be incredibly cool but quite tricky to get working from a single microchip controller? The obvious answer is to go with a four-wheeled 'bot using the transwheels (also called omniwheels on some sites).
This would give the simple controlability of a two-wheeled 'bot and the super-cool factor of an omin-directional (three-wheeled) 'bot.

As ever it comes down to cost and complexity. Three driven wheels are obviously cheaper to implement than four, but the level of complexity increases.
A bit more research is needed, and will be posted here as and when time allows....

Since attending the brilliant Brighton Robot Hack Night, ideas for taking over the world with a miniature robot army have never been far away. From what I learned on Thursday, they wouldn't be particularly threatening (we didn't have time to cover laser guns or making miniature atomic explosive devices) but there would be no danger of them bumping into anything as we made our march on world domination. I seem to be getting confused between Robot Hack Night and the plot of a book I'm reading at the moment. Seeing all the different ideas has got me thinking and the end result was the launch of (yet another) project which will be documented here.

When building robots, there seem to be two main questions: motion and sensors.
Will it be a robot with wheels/tracks or legs? I quite like the look of the hexapods but they're incredibly complicated for a beginner, so I'll stick to the (simpler) wheeled version.
Next you need to decide what time of intelligence and sensing to use - on Thursday we investigated using antennae to detect when the robot had hit an object, then made it back-up a bit, turn a random direction, then set off again. Another common type of robot is the "line follower" where an infrared beam is bounced off a black line and the robot adjusts it's direction to stay above it.

Whatever sensory method is used, the basic premise of my robot will be a wheeled device with two independently driven wheels (turning both at the same velocity causes the robot to travel forwards and backwards whereas forcing the wheels to turn in opposite directions causes the robot to turn). As this could form the basis of a number of similar "critters" it will form the basis of the next robot project.
See the http://www.nerdclub.co.uk/projects/project.asp?id=ROBOTBASE

...it is now.
Less than three weeks old and already my first missed blog post. Holy Crap!
According to the Bloggers Guide to Blogging, my blog is now deprived of readership and doomed to obscurity. The last few weeks disappear as if they've never happened, the earth will open up and Armageddon has already started.

Oh. How disappointing.
Nothing happened.

Well, nothing happened because of the missed blog post. Something was very much happening yesterday - and that's why there was no news: not because nothing was happening, but because so much was happening there was no time to scurry back and type it all up.

First up, the matinee performance of Waiting for Godot, starring Gandalf and Jean-Luc (Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart to the high-brow readers). Let's not forget Simon Callow, who would normally be a headline act in his own right - but happy to play second fiddle to these two giants of both screen and stage.
I didn't know much about the play - except I'd been told the spoiler ending many years ago on the odd occasion I attended an English Literature class (Godot never turns up) and that a lot of "grown ups" think it's boring.
To be honest, a theatre performance with three of the biggest RSC actors around sounded like a nightmare mix of luvviness and backslapping, but it's not every day you get see Gandalf and Jean-Luc live on stage!

What a fantastic performance: Ian McKellen was absolutely natural, Patrick Stewart was incredible and even Simon Callow failed to ham it up (too much) although he very impressively can turn his face purple almost at will. The play was much funnier that I'd expected - even the star turns had to check themselves to stop giggling every now and again. A brilliant performance. It's a shame it's sold out in Brighton - if there were any spare tickets, I'd be straight back in line to buy some more!

Straight after the theatre, there was only an hour to stuff some dinner down then get back on my bike and head off to the Brighton Robot Hack Night at The Skiff.
The turnout was very good and everyone was really enthusiastic about Steve's robot kit. Despite a few mishaps with the superglue (part of the hack was to modify some servos and a few people found that being over-liberal with the glue didn't exactly help to make their wheels go round!) it didn't take long for a few bumper robots to start scuttling around, in-between feet and chairs and coats and bags.

Downstairs, a league game of "shoot-the-bot-up-the-arse" broke out and players were invited to blast a poor defenceless robot up the back end, not just once but three times, and times were recorded in a league table. Despite never having used an air-pump gun before, I thought that my time of 140-odd seconds wasn't too bad. But I hadn't banked on the awesome might of Geek Girls With Guns.
Emily managed an incredible 24 seconds and as she went upstairs to gloat, Julie took to the hot seat and obliterated what looked like was going to be the record for the night, with a staggering score of just 17 seconds.

There wasn't quite the time left over at the end for letting all the new bots loose what had become the play area, downstairs, but as 11pm rolled along and people had to start making their way home, everyone was agreed that it had been a really good night. Personally, I'm already looking forward to the next one in about four weeks time.
Who knows - my PIC programmer might have even arrived by then!

Since moving down south and having to start paying rent again, I've been on a bit of an economy drive: and that means checking out Martin Lewis' Restaurant deals, filling in the coupons from the papers and becoming an avid follower of FreeCycle.
But here's a deal that I thought would appeal to like-minded techies: a free toolkit from PC Pro. It's an ideal starter set (I've been re-buying all my old kit from Maplin so this have saved me a few quid) with screwdrivers, snippers, tweezers and all that.

I don't usually plug this kind of thing, but since I just received mine in the post I thought I'd share it with anyone else out there, reading this drivel:

https://secure.widearea.co.uk/dennis/campaigns/6169/SUDD.html

Complete the subscription page, and agree to receive three copies of PC Pro.
One pound is immediately debited from your account, but the DD is for about twenty quid. You have three months grace, to try the magazines and cancel if you like (the idea being that you forget to cancel before your fourth magazine arrives and then you shout d'oh and it's too late).
The toolkit is yours to keep, whether you take the magazine or not.
When your toolkit arrives, cancel the direct debit (which I did this morning through online banking: I haven't seen a single magazine yet, but the toolkit is here in my kitchen, so it all worked out in the end!)

While waiting for my PIC programmer, I fell back onto a couple of ideas I've been kicking around for a while and decided it was time to do something about them. I have loads of half-finished projects kicking around and have never actually got close to finishing any of them.
Well, ok, a few years ago I completed an Everyone's a Wally remake (in Flash 5 no less) but I only managed to complete it because it was for a competition and the deadline was looming!

Maybe that's the problem with being a one-man-band.
There's never anyone on your shoulder, nagging or pushing you for a completed product. There's always tomorrow. There's always something else new and interesting and exciting to get involved with - like most nerdy people I know, once I've worked out how something works, it's time to move on.
And so the Nerd Club was born: with luck, getting a few different people involved will mean that different aspects of each project will appeal to different people. And there's probably a 1/1000 chance that something might actually get finished! But it's odds-on that more things will get started....

Which brings me onto this post: I've started another project.
Not picked one up that was flagging a few months ago and decided to breathe some new life into it, but start an entirely new idea. I'm writing an online game. It's going to be not just the biggest and best online game, but the best community/league game too (aren't they all?).

It's a mix between two of the best games of all time, blending the skill and strategy of (ZX Spectrum classic) Laser Squad with the brutal sports board game Blood Bowl. It doesn't have a title yet, but will basically be a football/fighting type game, "borrowing" the mechanics of the brilliant Laser Squad. In fact, it'll probably end up being the game that I hoped the new Blood Bowl video game would be.

(but written in Flash so you can play it in a browser)
Check out the projects page on the Nerd Club main site

Another revelation today (while not actually getting much work done).
I have no idea how other people see me. I have finally decided that I'm a bit nerdy and came to this conclusion because I spend too long becoming expert in any subject that takes my interest. I can be quite boring to talk to (unless talking to another nerdy person, and then you should see the sparks fly!) and I'm not exactly the life and soul of any party. I'm also pretty conscientious and like to see a job done properly.

So if you're familiar with the Dilbert Cartoons you'll understand how distressing it is to be miscast as any of the major characters.




I work in an IT department (surprise surprise) with a guy who is devilishly clever at avoiding work - in fact, he puts more effort into not working than if he just did the job in the first place! Let's call him Wally.
Then there's the management layer, one in particular who comes up will all manner of crazy and clueless schemes. She will come up with a half-baked idea and - not understanding what is involved - decides it must be simple to implement and sets an impossible deadline. Let's call her a pointy-haired-boss (PHB) - ok the gender is not quite accurate but bear with me.

I was a little too slow clicking the minimize button the other day, just as said manager walked in - she too was a Dilbert fan and identified with the same characters. But she got it totally messed up! In her mind, she was Wally (but in a "aren't-I-clever-pulling-this-being-lazy-stunt" way) while my Wally-like colleague had become the hapless and put-upon Dilbert but the killer was that I'D BECOME THE PHB!! She figured that I was the one who didn't know what was going on because I couldn't decipher what on earth she was talking about most of the time and that made me the dumb one.

I had to go for a lie down.
If everyone who reads Dilbert cartoons associates all the wrong characters to the wrong workmates, who the hell is who? And more importantly, who the hell am I??

I started this blog about a fortnight ago, and was determined to post to it every day. Why? Because the blog experts and website SEO gurus all said I should. If I don't make a post every single day, my blog will wither and die and no-one will ever find it. Ever.

And for a while, I went along with it. I started reading other technology-based blogs and noticed that their authors posted every day too. Then I noticed that for every post on most of these blogs, there were only actually one or two articles a week that were of interest. The rest of the time, there were just posts, linking to someone else's blog - someone else's work. And then I started thinking "perhaps I've picked the wrong blog to follow here, perhaps I should stick with this one (where all the content is coming from anyway)".

Tonight I very nearly fell into the same trap.
I know that I have to post every single day otherwise "master-blogger" alter-ego will turn back into Clark Kent and all the work I've put in to my blog to date would be worth less than a quarter share in HBOS. So I thought I'd just put a load of links to stuff I've been reading about and be done with it. After all, who would ever know? Everyone is doing it anyway.

And then it dawned on me that this is exactly what everyone IS doing.
Not just online diary-junkies, but bona-fida journalists and news reporters. Commentators on Match of the Day, weathermen and news anchors. It's on the telly, on the radio and all over the newspapers: people looking to fill column inches and dead air. It doesn't matter what the message it - just keep making a noise to fill the void. So for that, dear reader, I am truly sorry.

I promise that future posts will actually be - if not interesting to all - relevant. No more filling the gaps with noise. No more twittering when there's nothing much to say. And no more posts like this one. So hopefully you won't get fed up and move onto another blog, but stick with this and find the odd nugget of information or topic of interest.