Alex's Mobile: the wood work has been assembled, and now needs some varnishing before I put all the electronics in. The electronics has been moved from a breadboard to full soldered vero board.

On the Contraptor front, last night I built all the linear bearings, linear rails and sliding elements and almost completed all the shaft mounts.

Tuesday's are normally London Hacker Space meetups, but tonight, I shall forgo the cheese and booze and carry on working at home.

I've back dated a load of the updates, as I'd been meaning to post blog entries about the work, but hadn't gotten round to it.

So far I have a 3d design worked out a working prototype circuit and a full breadboard circuit also designed.

I'll try and put up some full photo's soon and maybe even some video of the prototype.

Most of these will be electronics based, but may well also pull in different disciplines.

Such as the Baby Mobile I'm making for Alex, which entails, woodwork, mold making, design and electronics.

My Contraptor kit has been shipped, and should be with me shortly.

The team had some issues with the initial run of kits, so I'm getting a Beta set, and they will ship me a corrected version, when they get the fabrication issues sorted out, at their cost. (Kudos to them, thanks guys!)

It has been posted on to a fellow hacker in Kent.

In the end I added quite a lot of stuff to the box. Amongst other things a 6MP CCD from an old Fujitsu S20 pro camera, a bunch of motors from CD-ROM and floppy drives and a few discreet ICs

Soon I will try and post an update about what I did with the switches I took out of the box.

There is some neat stuff in the box and I'll been sending it on shortly. I have a bunch of junk to add, and here are the photos.

I've removed a board that contained a load of backlit LCD buttons, probably to be integrated into the chest of a robot of the as an  emergency stop/go kill button etc.

I happened to have an Arduino Mega and a recently purchased WaveShield in my laptop bag.

So that lunchtime I mocked up a cardboard box with the Arduino + WaveShield with a couple of buttons.

Picture to come soon.

The first version, I had no resistors in my bag, so couldn't ground the digital inputs. This actually ended up with some pretty funny results around the office, as when ever someone approached Cheesoid, he would randomly start talking.

So as an extra feature I resampled the video clip and added more phrases that play at long random intervals.

He had contacted me because he had seen my name on the TGIMBOEJ.org, a site that coordinates Migratory Boxes of Electric Junk on the Internet.

My name has been down on this site for at least a year, finally I get to participate!

So within a few days it should arrive and I'll document here what's in it and what I do with whatever I find.

I also have to add some stuff. I think for starters a NX18 Nixie Tube as seen in the Adafruit Ice Clock

This section will document builds and any other interesting things about my experience with the Contraptor system.

I apologise to lovers of the Tomy Omnibot, but please be reassured that any robots that are used for hacking projects had already been used as donors for other more needy robots. Where possible I have restored robots. Only left over parts are used in hacking.