Recent blog entries for Whistlre

Well Christmas is over and I now have 2 more robots added to my collection. First one is the ER-1 from Evolution. Wife purchased it for me for Christmas. I didn't get any of the additions to it yet but I do plan on purchasing them. So far from what I have used of the ER-1 its pretty cool. Object recognition works well for items that don't change. But for things like yourself its a little more tricky. I havne't tested it yet but I am hoping that I will be able to use the recognition and have it focus on my skin tone to recognize me no matter what color shirt I am wearing.

Second robot added to my collection is the R2-D2 robot. I had been eyeing it for a few weeks now and right after Christmas Fred Meyers happened to have it on sale. Normally $109.99 on sale for $69.99. This is pretty cool little item. I kinda suprised that it was able to recognize my voice to the commands right out of the box. No training of my voice required. I do plan on setting up the ER-1 and playing around with both of them to interact with each other.

Been off work for a complete week and haven't done a dang thing. Bought another book on the AVR microcontroller but haven't read any of my books.

Put together the Build your own Sumobot kit. Had an old 450AMD K6-2 laptop that I planned on using to program the bot but I killed it. Decided to do a fresh install of the operating system. Installed the OS and noticed that I had both a C: and D: drive. I didn't want the small 4GB HD partitioned so I wiped the D: drive (it was called Saved Data). Attempted to reinstall the OS with the recovery CD and it said "No go Moe" I need the D: drive to reinstall. So I chucked it up to stupidity and just installed Linux 8.0 instead. So now I need to purchase a serial to USB connector so that I can play with my newer laptop that doesn't have a serial connector. At least till I get the hang of it and can program it using my Linux laptop. In case you were wondering this bot came with an embedded Parallax Basic Stamp 2.