I’ve been strangely absent from blogging recently, with only one highly cynical post in the last few months.

Well, it’s all for a good reason.

I’ve been putting in some “free” hours at work (and at home) on a new project. For once in the last year and a half, fun and work are not mutually exclusive. I’ve been working on a DARPA “Challenge” with a few other companies. The goal is to build an autonomous robot that can navigate though a city, avoid hitting cars, light poles, pedestrians, pot holes, etc… and do it as quickly as possible.

I can’t talk much about it, or anything else I do at work, but it’s teaching me a heck of a lot more about engineering that my current position. I get to play with LADAR units, play with MATLAB, design programs to interface with hardware, and watch a robot be built. All in all, things like this keep a engineer happy.

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Originally uploaded by GeoffKerr.

So, the stock GPS mount for my Garmin Etrex Legend only fits handle bars up to 1 inch; my bars are about 1.5 inches. Sounds like a good excuse to do a quick DIY project trying to figure out a way to fix the problem.

Not wanting to give up and take the mount back to the store, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build a mount for the GPS out of a round 3/4 inch dowel, a square 3/4 inch dowel, some rubber, a pull tie, and some creativity.

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Well, I havn’t had much time to actually work on projects of my own other than dream them up and work on some of the preliminary designs, but that doesn’t stop me from dream up more projects to work on.

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I was browsing Wired’s site, as I do every so often and came across an interesting article about how robotics and programs like the DARPA Grand Challenge are starting to have an effect on the automotive industry and the way people drive.

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I recently came up with a use for a bluetooth to rs232 adapter, but found that the comercially avaiable ones tend to run for a minimum of $90. Once my LED Binary clock is finished, I’ll start working on my own version of a bluetooth-serial adapter. A quick search on the internet found that I could probably put something together with about $40 worth of parts.

On the topic of the binary clock, the Atmel AVR hardware programmer and microcontrollers that I ordered a month and a half ago came in today and, since neither Lauren nor I were here to pick them up today, I’ll pick them up from the office when I get home from work tomorrow! Let fun begin!!!