Recent blog entries for kunal

Anybody interested in taking part in techfest 2005? http://www.techfest.org Im making a robot for this techfest. One of my main objectives is to have a transmission system on the robot, because the robot has to climp steep inclines. I have designed a 2 speed automatic tranny, and I hope it works. Power to weight ratio and low-end torque are the key ingredients here. I didnt want to increase the power to weight ratio by cutting down on structural components....the robot has to have structural rigidity when it jumps down that incline. Tranny should solve the problem.

LATEST UPDATES: Will be working on a customised Fuel Injection system on a 92.2C.C 4 stroke engine. I am using an ancient 486 laptop, but that outta do the work. Shall be ripping off the carb off the engine first. Then comes the herculean task of designing or modding fuel injectors, polishing intake manifolds, shaving off the cylinder heads for an increased compression ratio and increased power output. Why on Earth would I be talking about an engine? I just realised that I was making a BIG robot, and I needed something more efficient when it comes to delivering power...the orignal Spiderbot was stripped down, it's legs taken off apart, and now I shall have em' replaced with mini pneumatic tires. I have also realised that I would be investing a lot of time and money in fabricating the F.I system, so as of now crude pulleys pull the throttle cable which is attached to the carb. I have never posted my pics because this robot of mine is constantly evolving, it started from a small thing that just pranced around like a toy to something that may give sports cars inferiority complex!!!!..... Why? Engine produces 7.4 horses at 7500 Rpm, and the approx robot weight is 40 Kgs. Power to Weight ratio is a cool:(7.4/40)*1000 = 185Bhp/tonne. The final gearing is ridiculously short, and naturally because it should be able to tackle any terrain/gradient....

I am using a Via C3 1Ghz processor, and Im pretty happy with it. Using a Lead Acid accumilator and an SMPS which I designed myself, I was able to run it for 73 minutes. Im running the motherboard without the negative supply(-12,- 3.3 are not connected, and I am using an AT power supply using an 810E board) , so as of now the serial port is inoperable. Does anybody have a circuit diagram for an SMPS? Most of the programming is done, so that I can operate the stepper motors for my robot through the serial port, and because a serial port uses negative voltage (-15V to trigger a 1 I think), I cannot operate the motors.. Has anybody used the Intel PXA-255 for building a robot? Spiderbot is still not ready as of now, lots of modifications yet to be done, shall post the URL soon when I get the time to make a nice site.

hey all; just installed kernel 2.6.2 on Redhat linux 9.0, and the latest kernel has made the PC fast indeed... MY RIG: AMD ATHLON XP 2800+, Asus A-7N8x delux, 1024MB DDR 400, Geforce Fx-5700, 80GB*2 RAID 0... SOMEBODY PLZ CERTIFY ME TO MASTER......;)

Yesterday I just managed to take out my good old 486DX- 66Mhz with 16 megs of Ram and a 500Mb hard drive......well it took me 16 hours to install windows 98, nevertheless it was fun......its been ages since I have played around with those legacy devices, experimenting with those wierd jumpers trying to prevent IRQ conflicts. The best part was when win98 was trying to swap the pagefile......the hard disk was groaning under excruciating pain.......then came the benchmarking......I ran sisoft sandra 2002, and in the memory benchmarks the rusty ol' thing gave me the int. bandwidth as 24Mb/ps and float of 16Mb/ps. even a 5.4Krpm HDD on a PIO-4 mode has a better transfer rate than the mem bandwidth of this junk that has been lying on my loft for the past 4 years.....

Good news, spiderbot is almost ready, but because of the added modifications, the weight of the robot has increased significantly, and the spider-like movement isnt accurate at all, its ridiculously flimsy......Im using the RS232 to drive the steppers from my laptop. I orignally intended using my pentium processor and m/b for the robot, but couldnt mount it, because I had to increase the rigidity by plonking in steel subframes to the orignal, flimsy PCB chassis.This was a prototype, and its gonna be kept aside as of now, SPIDERBOT-II will hopefully replace the pathetic SPIDERBOT. Hey Timster, just to let you know, Im positively using the Via-C3+micro Mobo combo for this project. Also the dual segmented legs are going to be replaced by wheels...less headache. I need more info on the GUMSTIX micro-con.....

Are you sick of your old Pentium-II, and can't play games because of Low mem bandwidth? I just downloaded this CPU- cool software. goto www.podien.de and download CPU-FSb, its awesome. I have a Hewlett Packard Brio BA600, with a Pentium-III coppermine @ 650Mhz. The BIOS setup they have on all branded PCs wont let you overclock the damn processor by even a megahertz, so what this software basically does is overwrites your existing PLL values, and it works well. As of now, I just stuck a heatsink on the Northbridge (se- 440BX mobo) and with the stock cooling it was able to run Sisoft Sandra Burnin wizard (Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory and cache benchmark) a 100 times without crashing. But do be careful that you DO NOT overclock the PCI bus more than 37Mhz when using UDMA transfers on the Hard- drive, may result in Data corruption....also watch out for your AGP bus exceeding the speed, may result in unstability. Anyway the overclocked 440BX at 133Mhz FSB has better integer and Float Bandwidth than an 815E.( 976MB/s and 843MB/s on Sandra 2004). Somebody outta have this program for Linux.....as of now I start windows, restart the PC into Linux, because the overwritten PLL values remain even after rebooting.

Hey Tim; Thanks a lot for your suggestion...I will consider the VIA C3 processor. Frankly the processor is very dissapointing....a 667Mhz C3 is an equivalent of a 200Mhz Pentium PRO.....honestly that processor needs a better floating point unit...its sluggish on floating point calculations. On the positive side, Im impressed with the heat dissiaption, low power consumption. Yeah Im using a VIA P4M-266 chipset on my pentium 4, really a good chipset......what a pity Intel wanted to monopolize on the DDR chipsets....

Anybody good with Neural networks?......Um Im going to start working on a voice recognition system soon....well I have chalked out a basic plan where the hardware is concerned.......I need to use a powerful Microprocessor that doesnt Sap much power from the batteries.......I just started working on this thing called the 'SPIDERbot'....the base is reserved for the motherboard, I gotta steel plate which the mo-bo is gonna be mounted on...then there are stacks of circuit boards stacked by rods connected to the edges of the base plate.....so In all I got 3 stacks excluding the mobo.....the middle stack consists of the spider legs which move to and fro using steppers, and Im finally done with the hydraulics, I have used crude syringes to lift the legs, and it actually works using pascals law........I gotta hydraulic pump dishing out water through steel pipes I got from and old air-con......though I couldnt get a steel syringe....and yeah water because the oil damages the rubber on the syringe. A bit flimsy though. The Top houses 8 Stacks of Ni-Cd batteries taken out from a Black and Decker Vaccuum cleaners, damn powerful..... Getting back to the point, the bot is kinda immobile, because temporarily its connected to the parallel port of my PC.....I badly need a powerful processor which doesnt sap power like my overclocked Northwood in my desktop.......Do get in touch with me via mail, Im freakin preoccupied with a lotta work.......