I’ve never done anything bot-related and just couldn’t let it stay that way. A couple of friends and I (Hi there Miguel and Gonzalo!) have put together this simple bot and will be playing with it to discover the wonders of the Wiimote shortly.

It uses a Skypic board as brains and a Sky293 board for power, both of which are free hardware licensed under Creative Commons. Besides that it has some cheap sensors, the simplest skeleton ever, a couple of Futaba servos and a Wiimote (yet to be incorporated) as inexpensive do_it_all sensor. It’s not that a Wii Remote is cheap. Compare what it has to offer (accelerometer, optical sensor, Bluetooth connectivity) to the price of any single raw component from that list and you’ve got yourself the best deal ever!! And yes… if you own a Wii you can play with it too as a bonus. Thanks to Andres Prieto-Moreno (Hi, Teach!) for pointing out the possibilities of this little wonder.

Here… take a look.

It seems I’ll have it in a few hours. Soon after the last post I was notified that the computer would be shipped the same day.

If everything goes according to plan, it should arrive a day earlier than expected. That means this evening!

By the way… do you remember I said it was rock solid? Look at the impressive video I’ve found.

Just let me be the first to say it: ????Awesome!

It’s been a while since my last post. The last few months have been really crazy. Hopefully it’ll get more interesting from now on.

My current laptop isn’t in bad shape, but it is quite outdated now. Last month was my birthday, and since I didn’t do anything fancy I decided it was time to give myself a late present.

I would have loved a Macbook Pro, but I’m not made of money and I really wanted a hires screen.
So I did some research and finally decided on a ThinkPad R61. It’s a lot cheaper than the rest of the ThinkPad models, every single review I’ve read is excellent and I’m quite impressed with the specs.

It’s one of the models shipped by Lenovo directly with SUSE Linux, and as I’m not fond of paying a Microsoft tax for something I won’t be using, I tried really hard to find a retailer that would sell it with Linux in Spain. Unluckily with no success.

The price is just slightly above the average laptop, and it’s got one of the new Penryn 45nm Core 2 Duo processors, 4 GB of RAM, 15.4″ 1680×1050 screen and a rock solid design. I’ll be using it with Linux and OpenSolaris, so the virtualization support will be something to be grateful for.

I’m told I can expect it for this Friday. Just a couple more days… I can barely wait :)

As I said before, it comes with some severe software limitations, but as soon as I can unbreak it by wiping out Windows I’ll be bragging about the new machine right here ;-)