I got the Mini-Itx mainboard in the mail along with a case and power supply.

The RF kit came in the mail first thing this morning. I immediately began constructing the circuits that are required.

At 3:00 PM I successfully transmitted and received eight bits of data. This data was shown by LEDs. Earlier I thought that I had finished and had powered up all the circuits and my computer, run the computer program, and nothing happened. That had scared me. After studying the data sheet a little longer, however, I discovered that I was trying to connect the data in on the 8-bit encoder IC to ground instead of plus. I fixed this with eight PNP transistors and eight more 10k resistors. Finally, it worked!!!

I tried connecting the receiver to by bothers Dirty Jeep Wrangler using H-Bridge Circuits, but there wasn’t nearly enough power; I was using four AA batteries to power the receiver. It has a small supply voltage range: 4.5 – 5.5 volts. I decided to build a Lego base instead of using the Dirty Jeep. I figured that the Lego motors would use less power. I built a base, but had to add more gear reduction. After that I had to edit my program that controls the parallel port to prevent the melting of transistors. This was because I was now using tank style steering instead of traditional car steering, which required the H-Bridge circuits to be hooked up differently. Next I had to add some diodes because the two H-Bridge circuits were affecting each other which was causing the motors to be shorted, and barely move. They still didn’t go very fast, so I decided to use a higher voltage for the motors than the receiver. This required some interface circuitry. After a long time I had gotten it to work.

Now that I have a bigger power source for the motors, maybe I can switch back to the Dirty Jeep Wrangler RC truck again. This would be faster and have traditional car steering.

The RC car broke. It stopped turning left. While trying to fix it, I broke it even more. Now it is completely broken. I ordered an RF kit that has a range of 400 feet. The kit includes one transmitter, one receiver, one 8-bit encoder, one 8-bit decoder, two resistors, and two antennas. It cost $22.50 plus $8.08 for shipping.

I am experimenting with feedback on the neural network program.

After an unsuccessful attempt to solder to my RC car’s controller (I somehow broke it) I tried using another RC car. My little brother William let me use his. I took the circuit board out of the controller and removed the switches. Next I soldered wires to the solder terminals. Because this circuit board is supposed to be powered by 9V and the computer parallel port runs on 5V, I would need an interface circuit. This circuit, the controller circuit, and the computer would all be connected to a common ground. The interface circuit reads from the port and writes to the controller circuit. I installed a huge antenna and put all the circuitry in a white box. After revising my RC Controller program (written in VB) I plugged the white box into the parallel port and tested it. Success!

I packaged and installed one of the sample programs from NTPort onto my computer. Next I looked up parallel ports at howstuffworks.com and found out which pins are used for what. After connecting eight LEDs to the data pins and ground, I tried running the program. An error message came up that said that the program couldn’t find zntport.sys. I then uninstalled the sample program from my computer. Next, I searched for a file called zntport.sys on the family computer and found it. I re-packaged the sample program, this time including zntprt.sys. Finally, I installed it on my computer and tested it. There was one problem: I didn’t know the port address of the parallel port. I searched on google and found three possibilities. The first one that I tried worked!

Today I did some research on parallel port control. I found NTPort, a piece of shareware that can control all I/O ports on a PC that is using windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP, or NT. I downloaded and installed it on the family computer. Later I tested a sample that controls the internal computer speaker. It worked well.

Tim B. from VIA replied to an e-mail asking for clarification of the purpose of the Mini-ITX. This seems to be simply a very small computer motherboard. With a hard drive, CD drive, and some other stuff, it would be a PC. This is looking better and better.