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.

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.

A couple of new Arduino shields, namely a motor driver board and a wave shield, although I'm actually planning on using the wave shield on a children's toy (possibly).

I spent a decent part of a day, last weekend, stripping old hard disk drives, CD ROM drives, floppy drives and old mice for components. Stepper motors, brushless DC drives and various other juicy hacking hardware.

I've also been looking for a guide on how to power and control a 5400rpm hard disk spindle motor.
It has four contacts, one ground and three coil energising connections.

Similarly to a stepper motor, these connections should be connected sequentially, the frequency of the pulses will allow you to control the spindle speed with high accuracy.

One other thing you'll notice is that, like my reading habits, I tend to have lots of projects on the go at the same time. I'll come back to them every now and again, and then may drop them for lengthy periods (sometimes years) which frustrates my wife who tells me she is a "Completer Finisher" mentality.

That probably makes me a mix of  Plant/Implementer/Specialist