It’s that time of year again! The annual Robothon is coming September 21-23 at Seattle Center.

This event is always a lot of fun. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out some of my pictures from 2005 and 2006. There is always fun things to see and of course some of the robots are really amazing.

I’ll be taking a couple of minisumos (The Thin Man and Velox) with me this year, but I haven’t had time to work on any other projects. I had hoped to have a micromouse robot ready but I had to give up that project due to lack of time (other things seems to always interfere). However I’m sure I’ll be busy as there are plenty of events to watch even if I don’t have a robot for it.

Check out the Robothon site for details and hope to see you there!

We just returned from ten days away on Salt Spring Island doing not a lot. It was one of those holidays where we didn’t have any plans except to relax, drink some wine, read some books, and enjoy ourselves. Except that I kept myself busy with a couple of electronics projects and my ever-expanding library of robotics-related code.

I’ve become really interested in using the Controller Area Network technology to have multiple processors communicating together. While researching the options I found this project: CAN-CAN. I liked the simplicity of using the Microchip MCP2515 and it’s less expensive than using one of the Atmel processors with built-in CAN support. And this project really made it easy, I starting thinking it was something I could probably do. So I did! Here is the schematic for my version.

My first project used two separate ATMega8 processors talking to each other over a CAN bus. I read through the source code from the original project but figured I could build my own version, integrated into my own library of code for my robots. I made a number of improvements, making it easier to configure for different hardware. The main program sends a short text string from one processor to the other, where the case is reversed (uppercase to lowercase and vice versa) and a reply is sent back. Here is a picture of what it looks like in action on the screen.

I spent part of my holiday cleaning up the code and implementing interrupt-driven TX and RX. The fun didn’t stop there though. I wrote a second program that “sniffs” the CAN bus and pretty-prints out each message. This has turned out to be very useful while developing other programs with the library (more on this later).

I’ve packaged up my entire library plus these two demonstration programs and made it available for download here. There isn’t a lot of instructions but I’ll probably try to put together something in the future (maybe my next holiday?).

At work I spend a lot of time thinking about and looking at HTTP traffic. So when someone figured out a way to make that funny, I pay attention. This comic is really clever. Be sure to read the page source to squeeze out every bit of funny.

Eileen’s co-worker pointed out this hilarious little song by the New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords about the upcoming (in the distant past) robot rebellion.

It made me think of the book How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson. He gave a talk at Google that was sorta funny, also available on YouTube.

Seems there is a fresh round of geek comedy about robots going around.

A while ago I posted this recipe for a Bearnaise sauce. This past weekend I was making a sauce again but I forgot where I found the original one. Instead some surfing lead me to this one. It was much, much better and also easier to make. Highly recommended. And yes, it took me a while to find the original one for comparison.

Suggestions welcome for a better recipe if you know of one.