Next Idea, Robots
Last night I had an awful time trying to get the 12V-24V Radio Shack motor working via a motor controller. I think I actually fried one of my ICs in the process. But, I slept on it, and figured that I was just trying to send too much voltage/current through the chips. So today after work I went to the Shack and bought some higher current transistors.
The good news is that I got the motor to operate correctly and vary its speed accordingly. This made me start thinking of ways to see how much thrust was being generated by the motor. In the end I tie-strapped a screwdriver to the motor, and then held it extremely loosely in my hand and turned it on at full speed.
The bad news is that it didn’t lift the screwdriver. At this point, I don’t want to buy a hobby motor, much less 4 of them (since they are like $30 for the cheapest one).
I believe I am going to tentatively move on to building robots. I found a good guide online that will teach ya to build your first simple robot. You can make it a couple of different ways. One of them you can make it go to where light is (it has two light sensors on each side of it, and you program it to find which side is brighter and turn towards it until they are equi-bright). Another one has a range finder and will go until it senses an obstacle, and then turn slightly, and continue.
I also want to start building spy stuff. Not really because I want to spy on anyone, but because they all seem like the easiest things to build. I’ve seen a really simple way to build a USB keylogger where you just plug it in to someone’s computer and it presents itself as a keyboard and collects all the typed data. Then you can open notepad, and type some command that it is watching for, and it will type out everything that was entered.
I wanted to build a universal remote control, but I have since lost interest. I spent one whole night figuring out how to decode remote control signals. Once I figured that out, I lost the interest in actually making the remote (and it seems like people have a hard time finding good IR emitters that go more than 10 feet). I probably will make my robot have an IR sensor though.
And then at some point I probably need to figure out how to use radio waves to transmit information. I’m sure I can come up with some project for that.