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  • 2008
    • September
      • New Blog Software
        09/04/08
        I have switched to WordPress based blog , so all new post will be made there...

        I hope you stick with me. The new site should allow more interaction...

        Thanks,
        Jim

    • August
      • T+2 Days... The 2008 Challenge is Over
        08/04/08
        I suspect that most people reading this have some idea of what took place on Saturday, but I will fill in some gaps. I'm still exhausted, but here goes...

        Summary:

        Nine robots actually competed
        No excavator put regolith in the collection box
        Only a few even moved

    • July
      • T-26 Days...
        07/07/08
        However, I have a fantasy that 7/31 will be "hands off", so that makes 24 days...

        I am happy with the progress, but still lots to do. Finalizing the drive train, and still looking for the "just right" motors. I am using a conveyor to lift material into a hopper, and st

    • June
      • Approaching T-5 weeks and counting...
        06/23/08
        I have been working on the excavator for many months at a somewhat leisurely pace, and am now starting to feel the crunch, as I imagine everyone else is...

        The video went well, as most sub-systems are operational. I'm still working on the navigation, and it's going fairly well,

    • May
      • Beam Power Challenge 2008 Ideas
        05/30/08
        I haven't written anything here for a long time, my bad, but I don't have much to say about the excavation challenge right this second either...

        The next beam power challenge is coming up this Fall, and it's not too far away. I once thought about entering, but I just don�

  • 2007
    • September
      • Regolith 2008, and More
        09/28/07
        I have gotten a few comments posted about the next regolith excavation challenge, and I will address those, and some other issues here...

        The 2007 challenge was a little strange. The first prize was $125,000, and that should have been enough to cause a lot of interest. Initially, I heard

    • August
      • Ron Paul for President
        08/21/07
        I generally try to keep politics out of this blog, but I must mention this guy at least once.

        No other member of Congress has the integrity, or the consistent voting record of this guy, I am totally impressed. Most of his ideas to repair the United States are a little on the fringe, but t

    • June
      • The New York Times Magazine...
        06/28/07
        ... is publishing an article on Sunday, July 1, about the NASA Centenial Challenge program. They will be focusing on the latest three challenges, including the regolith challenge that I participated in.

        A photographer from the magazine spent a day at my house a couple of weeks ago, so I a

    • May
      • The 2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge is Over
        05/15/07
        It has been a very busy 30 days, but well worth the effort...

        There were 4 teams at the competition on May 12th, and my machine was the only one to run the entire 30 minutes. It also moved about 75 kg of JSC-1A, 65 of it going into the collector, 10 on the ground. It also ran exactly at t

    • April
      • Lunar Regolith Excavation Challenge
        04/15/07
        Well, I decided to take the plunge and enter this contest with only one month until the competition... Here is a link to the information site.

        This is a NASA sponsored contest to create a machine that can excavate lunar soil to be processed, one process being removing breathable oxygen f

    • March
      • Simple State Machine in C
        03/31/07
        Over the past few years I have been reading about UML Statecharts and state machines in general, but never found a construct that I liked for small embedded systems. Most designs have some events being fired from outside processes, but in most of the stuff I do the event processing belongs inside of

      • Robot manipulator arms...
        03/30/07
        I stumbled upon a very good book about robotics called Robot Modeling and Kinematics , by Rachid Manseur. It is completly about modeling robot arms, and nothing about navigation, etc.

        One of the neatest things is that it comes with a bunch of programs that create VRML files to simulate r

    • February
      • Build season is over...
        02/22/07
        I hope that all of the FIRST team memebers reading this had a successful build season, and my best wishes for competition.

        I obviously never posted any code to run the DOS chip thing from the robot controller. Hopefully there was enough information posted so that someone could get it runn

    • January
      • DOS Chip Update...
        01/23/07
        Actually, I don't have too much to update, I have been totally swamped with the FIRST Robotics programming challenge.

        Next week I hope to integrate the DOS chip with the IFI robot controller, so I will post the new code at that time.

        Jim

      • Talking to the DOSonCHIP module - Part II
        01/06/07
        Part I of this series talked about low-level communication with the module, which is done through a single, hardware dependent function. It also talked a little about how to execute some of the module commands.
        [more]
        I got the test file working with many high-level features, and will di

      • Talking to the DOSonCHIP module - Part I
        01/04/07
        So far the discussion about the DOSonCHIP module has focused on the low-level, hardware requirements to talk to the module. I have gotten this working to the point where it is time to move on to the software aspects of using it.
        [more]
        The lowest level software component is a single func

      • Using an SPI port on a microcontroller
        01/03/07
        SPI stands for Serial Peripheral Interface and was invented by Motorola many years ago, and other companys have called the same interface by different names. It is a synchronous protocol, which means that data is clocked out-of/in-to a device with a separate clock signal. More information can be fou

      • Using the DOSonCHIP module from Wearable, Inc.
        01/01/07
        I have started playing around with a module that makes it easy to read/write data from/to SD memory chips connected to embedded microcontrollers. I will post some information here to, hopefully, make some other people's experience with the thing easier.
        [more]

        As a programming