...Recent Developments...
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Sept-'08: Change is in the wind... After 10years with the same employer I have taken the first large step to return my life to wonderful Pugetropolis. In so doing I am trading the monster snow fall and massive floods for continual drizzle and volcanoes! :-) The change has me energized and the move and living with the studio in storage for a number of months while I sell the old home and find a new one will be nearly unbearable, and yet, somehow, I'll make it. During the coming months there will, likely, be little progress to report here until the new studio is in the growing stages and once again the creative processes are allowed to take over.
Strange that it had taken over 3yrs to accomplish this task, however one of the last steps I have taken before tearing down the studio is to document it photographically for posterity. If you care to see how things turned out check out the images Studio Link: page.
August-'08: I have fleshed out the new suspension and now have taken the time to post the full 3D CAD model of the Sojourner robot available here: CAD Model The model is a wire frame surfaced IGES model so the surfaces can be discarded for full wire frame geometry or the surfaces can be rendered to generate viewable images.
May-'08: There are a lot of projects in work in the robot studio right now. The design for the motor control systems for the Sojourner robot project are starting to take shape, visible in electronics Section 72 and Section 73. In addition a large amount of the early mechanical fabrication is under way and has been chronicled in the Sojourner robot project Section 7.
In addition I have been developing the long range radio telemetry system for Protobot.
Nov-'07 This section contains a new section of photos taken during ProtoBot's first public engagement at the Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG) competition located in the Fair Park pavilion in Dallas Tx. See ProtoBot fully assembled sans a few sensors here: 
ProtoBot Section 06 This section also presents a video outlining some of the wheel control tuning.
May-'07 Once again, extreme hours and months spent on the road traveling for "the man" has significantly delayed the work at hand. Even so, development prior to and after this 3-month work binge has produced results that are chronicled on the pages in: ProtoBot Section 04 Yeah, sigh, this one is worth checking out...
Dec-'06 This month has been busy. There are five new electronics projects to go along with the forth coming unnamed robot project. The details of these new controllers can be viewed at the following links. Robot Controller: Robot Power Systems: Robot Motor Driver: Robot Remote Intf: Robot Vector Display:
Nov-'06 The APU Power System Controller project is up and running, or at least the processor system side is. I designed in some specialty precision high current surface mount sensing resistors and they are back ordered which is delaying the project, but the board is up and running. I have posted the assembly language boot loader I wrote for this project as well... 
Nov-'06 Have you seen the APU Project ? The new sojourner robot needs a substantial amount of power for extended foraging, loiter and return. This Axillary Power Unit (APU) project is designed to supply 600W sustained and 900W repetitive several second duration sustained surges. For this non-trivial power generation system, I've combined a gasoline engine, an unregulated 3-phase alternator and a custom processor controlled feedback system for regulation.
Jun-'06 The Mill Chip Screen mechanical project is now completed and installed on the milling machine. For photos, part details and an overview, check out this link.
Jun-'06 The Lathe Backsplash mechanical project is now completed and installed on the lathe. For photos, part details and an overview, check out this link.
May-'06 The Rover / Sojourner robot project has begun in ernest. Some of the first body parts have been fabricated and a large amount of design work now stands testament via CAD models and components procured to make this project a reality.
Mar-'06 yet another electircal project I built over the last year. This one implements a USB loaded Xilinx FPGA to perform Digital Audio Processing on optical and coaxial SPDIF streams. Check it out, this project is pretty cool.
Feb-'06 I posted this one a month or so ago, and forgot to update the intro page to let folk know it was there. This one is a Video Borders project. It uses analog capture and hold to sample black levels and overwrite boards with a CPLD controlling the timing.
Jan-'06 The new workshop is starting to take shape. I snapped a few quick pictures of the moving process lifting the 3,800Lb milling machine up and over the new diggs. yep, pretty cool, check it out.Flying Mill.
Aug-'05 I have started working on the development of the larger home built Gantry Mill Project. Unfortunately, an unscheduled plant closure is forcing a quick "relocation" process which involves moving my entire machine shop and all of my equipment. Ugh... ;-) There are several new numbered pages to go along with this including Calculations, New CAD and a pile of New Parts.
Mar-'05 I had set aside the large robot project for a number of years. Recently I've made progress on a new addition to the overall design. Follow this link to the control box page and check out the new developments...
Feb-'05 There are a few new sections. I've added an overview of the tiny cramped metal shop that I use to make most of the stuff detailed on these pages. I've also taken some time to document some of the electronics gear that is used in the development, debug and test of many of the controllers documented in these pages. Finally, I've gone back and documented a legacy project.
Nov-'04 It's been a while but I've taken the time to write another article for the Seattle Robotics Society's Encoder online publication... It's not been published yet, but you can read the advanced copy here.
Sept-'04 I've gone back and had a lot of fun machining the complex screw for my new submersible. At the bottom of this page a story board of the steps to create it has been added.
July-'04 Most of my recent work has been centered about the development of the FPGA based vision system for Robot Dohn Joe, here.
I've spent some time updating the Injection Mold Machine project. Available here is the updated 3D CAD model of the machine with the updated changes incorporated. If you don't have time to download and play with the IGES file, then click here to look at graphical projections of the same.
Yes, still more ... The control box for the mold machine has been re-worked and the new thermocouple signal conditioning boards installed. To see this work click here. And as if that's not enough, the new toggle clamps are in work. This involves a pretty major restructure of the machine's configuration. To see that, click here.
Hummm... New toys. Check out the top left of this page.
I've started work on the color vision development board. This project outlines the Video Input Processor front end. A new section has been set up to hold these files (contrllers_2) as the original controllers section was getting a bit full.
This project has been many years completed. I've finally managed to get two MPEG video clips digitized and posted showing two short motion clips of the Walking Robot I built as part of a group project at Washington State University... WSU Robot.
Progress abounds: Check out the new photo's of the New_Small_Bot).
The Coldfire project is up and running (controllers=>36). Click here to jump to that section.
The 68882 math co-processor project is off the ground and fully working at the hardware level (controllers=>48). Click here to jump to that section.
The Multi-Font driver for the TFT screen project is up and running now as well (25/Jan/'02) (controllers=>37). Click here to jump to that section.
