The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer. The second was to test the electronics before assembly. This would prove to be more eventful than the printing.
I was least sure about all the electronics. They components arrived and… they sure looked okay. I didn’t think the buzzer looked quite right — it looked too big, but I figured that it even if a little lose it should make something approaching a buzzing noise.
The first stage of building a dancing, obstacle avoiding robot was to build the body and legs using my 3D printer.
Surprisingly, for someone who has been playing around with computers since I was eleven but only had a 3D printer for a month, I was much more worried about the electronics than the actual making stuff.
So confident, in fact, that initially I placed all six pieces into one print job.
My wife got me a 3D printer for my birthday/Christmas. I’ve printed a few little things since then, but I’ve been itching for a bit of a project. I didn’t want anything too ambitious but, clearly, there’s no point in doing something that can’t fail.
After much searching, I decided upon Otto, a walking, dancing, obstacle avoiding robot.
In this post I’ll talk about how I prepared for the project and my thoughts on its likely success (or otherwise).
Coming into the beginning of last year I decided I would try to read more books. I do most of my reading on my commute and the previous couple of years I had not had to regularly go to an office, so I managed few books and no novels at all.
While my total of twelve books may not set the world on fire, I managed to read some interesting ones so I thought it might be worth writing a few words on each one.
I’m sick of last years referendum on our membership of the EU being used to justify… pretty much anything. And any criticism is met with “you have to respect the will of the people.”
Well, I’m a person and I don’t think my will is being respected by many politicians and much of the media. The result of the referendum doesn’t say that people are happy with a so-called Hard Brexit, dismantling the NHS or using EU citizens as negotiation pawns.
I got some Bluetooth headphones about a year ago as an experiment. They were cheap but more than lived up to expectations. The lack of wires really is a game changer, albeit a totally #firstworldproblems one.
But they had flaws. When Apple announced their AirPods I was intrigued. Would they fix the problems while keeping the benefits? At ten times more than my old headphones I hoped so.
They arrived only a few hours ago so this isn’t a thorough review but here are my initial thoughts.
I can’t make up my mind about “And Another Thing…,” Eoin Colfer’s book, which is the sixth Hitchhikers novel, the first not written by Douglas Adams.
On the one hand I wanted to give it a fair chance, try to judge it on its merits rather than simply as a H2G2 book not by Adams. On the other, it’s clearly not by Douglas Adams. It has the same characters. It’s clearly by someone who is a Hitchhiker fan and some things — like the names of places and things — feel spot on.
One of the great things about WordPress is the community and the number of great plugins that can do amazing things with little effort.
But all that code, as any good developer will tell you, is a liability. How do you pick a plugin that not only meets your requirements now, but will both continue to do so? WordPress advances. APIs change. Plugins need love too.
Many moons ago I settled upon Flickr Gallery, a plugin that allows you to import Flickr images just by adding a short-code to posts. I thought there was value in keeping all my public photos in one place and, at that time, WordPress had poor media management facilities. The plugin seemed popular and well supported.
It’s important to have a Top 10 list. I know this as every other site has one. I don’t want to miss out. So here are the top ten most read posts here this year, with the year they were originally published in parenthesis:
If there’s a lesson here in increasing readership it’s simple: get retweeted by people with lots of followers.
For some reason, when I saw the poster for the new movie “Fury,” I misread it as “Furry” and saw a beard on Brad Pitt that wasn’t really there. I’ve tried to correct these errors.