News in brief

This weekend was a total wash.I really thought I was going to master rails in a single sitting but it just wasn't in the cards for me. I don't know if rails is that complicated, or I am just dumb. Anyways I definetly have a much firmer grasp on rails now, and am just at a point where I can actually start hacking away at a web app. Yeah it took that long. I was going to impliment a pleasure/pain system in my nxt brick robot and have people be able to give it rewards based on what it was doing, through a rails application I thought it might be easier than perl simply because I knew that rails had a database abstraction layer.....Oh what I didn't know. Anyway, I rebuilt the next brick according to someone elses design as well, to get it more suited for such a task, however, the configuration I used couldn't turn left or right....DOH. So event that was a wash. I also came to the realization it's getting harder and harder for me to start popping out a simple perl script once or twice a week, without either repeating myself or not paying enough attention to the script or the writing. Normally what I produce on my blog posts are simple hacks you can do in a single sitting. It looks like that will be changing(though I am sure every now and then I will pop one out, just out of scratching my own itch). I will be concentrating more on ruby and still on perl as will with a minor in objective c and maybe just plain c from now on. That being said I am also going to start focusing more on computer security as well, as this was the original intention of the blog, the robotics stuff will still be there.
So Check out Leggor.de and in particular Herold's Truck, I will embed the video below. The video is very well produced and meticulous, if not a bit creepy at the same time.


Thanks to leggor.de, i found that there are indeed lego cad files, you can open them in a variety of programs, I have been using Lego digital designer and have found that that works best for me(Windows and Mac).

That being said I also revisted my strobe design on my arduino chip, and relized that, that post is badly written and the code is worse, so here is some corrected code, with the caveat of this design probably needs to be calibrated using the serial monitor based on the lighting in the room:

#define LED 13                 // LED connected to digital pin 13

int val = 0;
void setup()
{
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);      // sets the digital pin as output
   Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  val = analogRead(0);
  Serial.print(val);
  Serial.print('\r');
  if(val < 13) {
    digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
    delay(100);                 
    digitalWrite(13, LOW); 
    delay(100);
    digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
  } else {
       digitalWrite(13, LOW);
   }
}

That being said, my hubris has raised the chance of a real technical post for this weekend to about 99 percent fail, I am still going to try and crank something out but who knows.

Old Arduino Strobe post

PS

I built alpharex wrong, I'm sorry.