I spent an hour or two building a remote control car with a wireless X-10 camera on it. It works, but the 12V battery that it's powered by can't give enough power to drive the car and power the camera. Oh well. The actual race vehicle will be finished by this weekend anyway.

While waiting for a hair cut I went to a nearby RadioShack and got some connectors I needed.

My dad took me to get welding gas, sheet metal, and cutting blades. I forgot to get the cutting blades, and Interwest Metals didn't have the right guage sheet metal. I got some anyway. At least we have welding gas now.

Today I finished the RC Receiver/E-Stop unit for the Expeditor. I wired it to a 12-pin plug for easy removal, and during the Grand Challenge it will be replaced with a separate circuit that will plug into the DARPA supplied E-Stop.

January 25th, 2005

Unfortunately I discovered today that there are two types of serial port headers, and the cables I got are the wrong type for the Mini-ITX motherboards -- I had to cut the ribbon cables and rewire them. The parallel port cables worked though. I also made it so that the Roboteq controller has a default RC mode, but the software switches it to serial mode when it is run. All this while I should have been studying for finals tomorrow :-/

January 24th, 2005

I rewired a cable and added two songs to teamprodigies.com's "playlist".

January 22th, 2005

I made another trip to RadioShack and got some more needed connectors and such before falling asleep for the weekend due to a fever.

January 20th, 2005

I made it so the play button on this website plays all of the songs in a random order instead of randomly selecting one song and playing it, so it's more like a playlist now.

January 17th, 2005

I ordered a couple backpanel "port add-ons" so I can connect to the headers on the Mini-ITXs for the extra serial ports and parallel ports.

January 15th, 2005

Today I fixed all the problems with the software that were preventing it from running on the robot's computers, including adding forgotten DLLs to the software packages and reinstalling the software, installing some port communication software that I had forgotten I was using, and discovering that running the on-screen keyboard software built in to Windows XP makes the COM1 port unusable. I also went to radio shack and bought about $14 worth of power connectors.

January 12th, 2005

We are officially a Grand Challenge entrant, DARPA having received parts 1 and 2 of our application.

January 9th, 2005

I added some more music to this website. If you click the play button in the upper left corner it will play some randomly selected music. There are currently only three tunes in the selection.

January 8th, 2005

I drove to Tacoma to get all my electronics.

January 7th, 2005

I ordered a metal-geared dual ball bearing 195oz/in servo for shifting between drive, reverse, and neutral.

January 1st, 2005

I bought a swing arm bearing kit and axle bearing kit on eBay. I also bid on a front wheel bearing kit and front shocks.