Happy New Year! I know we’re almost into February, but it’s been a while since I’ve updated here. Several new things are happening right now and I thought I should share it here. Continue reading
I finally added an app to my blog that allows me to publish code directly. This is the SyntaxHighlighter Evolved plugin that I found through the WordPress Plugin page.
As an example I can print python code:
print "Hello World"
I can also print c++ code:
cout << "Hello World";
While it may not look terribly impressive with my two examples, I expect that in the near future I’ll be posting more code into my posts where the formatting will be more useful. I’ve wanted this capability for some time but finding the right syntax highlighter for my needs took a while. I’m quite pleased with the out-of-the-box performance and all the great options it gives me.
Today at a white elephant lunch party for my work I managed to come away with a pretty fun gift. I got a little robo vacum (typo intentional). At first I thought it would be great to have a little robot vacuum running around my desk. I’ve already obtained two used roombas for other projects and thought this could be fun. But it turns out the thing is just a stylized vacuum, no robot included.
Well I figure I have two choices. I can save this thing until next year and re-gift it at the next holiday party. Or, even better, I can mod the thing in my free time. I like option 2 better, personally, and have already thought about adding a little Larson scanner to give it a cylon personality, some motors and wheels to replace the arms, and a few IR sensors to give it behavioral awareness. When you take out the vacuum it turns out there is a lot of room inside, so I could definitely do more there. If you have ideas then let me know.
Meggy Jr
This weekend I finally got around to building my Meggy Jr. kit that I won in the Instructables Arduino Contest. I spent only about an hour actually building the kit, though I could have gone faster if I wasn’t watching reruns of Stargate Atlantis at the same time. After a quick run down to the store to buy some AAA batteries the kit booted up like a charm. I spent a good half hour playing with the game that came pre-installed on the Atmega328 chip. Really fun stuff.
What’s next? I’m hoping to sit down after the holiday and get some good play time in with the API for the Meggy Jr. I’m not exactly sure that I’ll program a game at first, but maybe some scrolling text or interactive light displays might be good. Maybe I could even build a mood light for the garduino I built, though a BlinkM might be more suited to that application. The capability of this thing is even better than I imagined so I expect lots of fun ahead.
I just learned that I am a winner of the Instructables Arduino Contest! I’m really excited about that. I entered my Garduino Upgrade project right on the deadline for this contest and I’m so proud that I got First Place with three others. I didn’t get the Grand Prize, but I did win a Meggy Jr. RGB Super Kit from Evil Mad Scientist Labs along with two other great projects. I can’t wait to get my hands on this kit to see what I can make next. Maybe I’ll program my own version of Pong before deciding on what kind of mad science to do next. Thanks to all my friends that voted for my project too! I couldn’t have done it without your help and support.
