Car Aquired!

Well, I got a barbie car. My neighbors had one that they didn't want anymore, so we got it for free. It doesn't work, and it needs some serious help. It had been sitting outside for a long time, so pretty much all the screws are rusted beyond ever being unscrewed again. It still has a battery and charger though. Here are some pictures of it with the seat removed. Luckily, new motors look pretty easy to install. We will be meeting in the next day or 2 to discuss hardware and everything, so parts should be in the mail soon. Yesterday I started working on a stripped down version of Ubuntu to run on an old desktop we will use. It is command line only, no GUI, and has a good collection of common linux tools. I wanted Ubuntu rather than something like D*mn Small Linux (DSL) because of apt-get. Waaaaay easier to install new stuff. So the main stuff it has on it is SSH, Python, and Remastersys which I use to make a liveCD of the current installation. I managed to get to version 2 yesterday (I'm not messing with partial versions, the first ISO I make is version 1, the second is version 2, etc). It also has gcc on it of course. It turns out that there is a really nifty Python command that spawns an HTTP server that serves the current directory:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.

As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.

First projects

Yesterday, my friend and I built a Heron's fountain. Wikipedia has a good description of you don't know what that is. Here is a video of it (sorry for the format, it was taken on my phone), and here is a picture of the first version. The first version we tried to get away with using Slurpee straws (we biked a couple miles to get them because we had no car) which didn't work. So once we got a car, we bought aquarium tubing and it worked great. The most important thing is the seal at each bottle. We first tried impression material (yes, we just had some lying around), which worked ok, but it set pretty fast and was hard to get in small cracks. We read somewhere that PlayDoh would work well. It didn't. Turns out that it actually dissolves in water. Finally, we had a stroke of genius and used hot glue. It looked much better and worked great.

Today, I made version 1 of a business card with planetary gears in it. Here it is. The problem is that the card stock I used is 20 pound, and its a bit too thin to let the gears mesh. I am going to try it again with 40 pound, or any thicker I can find. I also cut it out by hand with a scalpel and scissors. Most people did it with a laser cutter or a CNC. I found an instructable on how to make a laser cutter with 2 scanners, but I thought of a better solution: a lego plotter. I know that the Mindstoms set came with instructions on building a printer, I just need to change the pen to a laser diode, which is not hard. Programming would probably be a pain though. But I'm sure there's some homebrew stuff out there.

Lots more projects in store. Barbie car should be starting soon.

Finally

Hooray, first year of Tech done. I have so many projects I want to work on this summer. I'm going geocaching today, and my and my friend are going to start work on the Barbie Car soon. I am also working on getting a server set up for hosting. I'll post back as projects are finished.

one more thing

I need to write a script that will make me a daily/weekly schedule. It needs to generate the weather, stuff from my google calander, parse the facebook birthday page, put important rss feeds on there, etc. There are scripts that do some of this, I just need to modify them.

I lied

Had to write these down. These are the embedded electronics modules that I want to play with:

-XBee wireless
-arduino (lillypad, duamelavente or however you spell it)
-MAKE controller
-phidget
-vex controller
-ATMega

work

There won't be any posts for the next couple weeks because of finals. I will literally be studying 24/7 for the next 3 weeks. I promise I have lots of cool projects planned for the summer, and I will update that as soon as I can. Until then...

What are the odds?

Recently, my friend's dad got 5 of the 6 lottery numbers and won a bunch of money.

according to Wikipedia, the odds of winning the florida lottery is 1:22,957,480

(the odds of what her dad won are 1:81,409)

according to the national safety council website, you are:

4 times more likely to die from legal execution than win the lottery

3 times more likely to die from being hit by lightning

about as likely to die from excessive heat or cold from a man made origin

about as likely to die from being confined to or trapped in a low oxygen environment

2 times more likely to die from being struck by another person or from the explosion of a pressurized device

11 times more likely to be killed from an accident when you are an passenger in an animal drawn vehicle.


That is why I will never buy a lottery ticket.