I installed Windows XP on the other computer and then activated both copies of XP. I also ordered a 7" touch screen monitor.

I got the new 80GB hard drives in the mail and installed Windows XP Professional on one of them.

I was driving the Expeditor around my neighborhood, and I stopped it in front of my house. I turned off the remote control, which should have shut the engine off, but instead the robot revved up it's engine, turned left, drove accross my neighbor's yard and crashed into his house. The only thing that could have caused this is radio interference. I'll have to add as an extra safety measure an encoded signal sent from the remote control, and a receiver on the robot that must receive that particular signal on that particular radio channel. That should make it fail-safe.

I got my money back for the defective hard drives and then bought two new 80GB hard drives on eBay, this time with a 1 year manufacturer's guarantee. Today was the last day of school before Thanksgiving Break, so Chris and I should be able to get together and put the breaks on X.

I wanted to test the motherboard that the burnt out PW-70A power supply was connected to. I took the broken one out and plugged in the good power supply, plugged it into the battery, and it immediately burnt out. I had connected it to the battery backwards. Each power supply costs $50, and I wasn't about to go spend another $100 to replace them. Instead, after I had calmed down from being angry at myself, I looked carefully at one of the power supply's circuit boards and found a very small white box labeled "F1" that had "10A" printed on it. I decided it was a ten-amp fuse, and that the fuse might have been the only thing to break. It was obviously not meant to be replaced and was only there to protect the computer from damage, but that wasn't going to stop me. I went to RadioShack and got some fast-acting 10A automotive fuses and soldered some wires to the PW-70A circuit boards so that I can plug my own fuses in. In my opinion I improved the power supplies as well as saved $100 - now the fuses are replacable.

In the picture the red thing connected by the black cable is my new fuse. The old fuse used to be between the two spots that the white wires coming out of the black cable are soldered to.

I passed driver's ed this morning. Afterwards I fixed a problem with my RC engine-shutoff circuit - in order to give the RC circuit the power to shut off the engine I had to flip a switch after I had started the engine. This is somewhat dangerous; if I started the engine and X immediately began to drive away I would have no way of turning off the engine. This switch was the flame-out switch (connected to the spark plug). I wanted to replace the switch with my circuit, but to do that I would have had to get inside the engine, and I don't want to modify the engine in any way. After some testing with a multimeter while the engine was running I determined that when the switch is in the on position it connects the spark plug to +2V, and when it's in the off position it connects the sparkplug to GND (turning the engine off). I rewired the circuit so that the flame-out switch is in the on position at all times and the circuit uses a relay to connect the spark plug to the switch (+) in order to start/run the engine and to the case (GND) to stop the engine.

Yesterday I drove the Expeditor around my neighborhood by remote control. The computer still isn't on the robot because of the various problems with the computer. I found out exactly what the problems were - the two hard drives I purchased on eBay are defective, and I burnt out one of the power supplies, but the two VIA Mini-ITX boards are just fine.

I've been quite busy with school, homework, and driver's ed, so I haven't been able to get much done. This, along with the defective hardware, and the fact that I'm taking it easy for a bit until after Thanksgiving mean that I won't be getting much done for a couple weeks, but I finish driver's ed on Saturday, so I'll have a bit more time after that. I'm excited for the first autonomous test!

Having computer problems. I've been having trouble with the MII Mini-ITX computers since I got them. In fact, I haven't even gotten the operating systems installed.

First, before the RoboNexus, I tried to install WinXP, but partway through the install process the computer started having problems. I assumed this was from heat since I had both motherboards in a cusom 8"x8"x4" case with no fan.

During the RoboNexus I put the motherboards in a new case with plenty of air. This time when I tried to install the OS both Mini-ITXs said that there was no hard drive detected.

Tonight I've been trying some more. Some experimentation found that the hard drives have to be connected to the end of the ribbon cable instead of the middle in order to be detected. I thought that all the plugs on the ribbon cable were identical, but apparently they aren't. Now the hard drives are detected but the computers say that they won't work. I also think I burnt out a power supply just by touching the hard drive to it's exposed circuitboard.

I soldered the safety RC shut-off circuit. Previously it was on a breadboard and very temporary.