Time to burn the calendar

I have to say that 2007 was the worst year on record for us. Nothing comes close. We made it through the holidays but it was tough.

I did some robot repairs and then repaired the repairs and finally the third time was a charm. I swear B9 is haunted. There's still several things that need attention but I'll get to them later. I ended up going back to two voltage regulators for the head. One 1.5 v for the ears (adjustable) and one 5v for the brain cam motor and lights. It slowed the ears down to a more normal rate.

So tonight being New Years eve is a joyous one for Yvonne and I. On New Years day we will say goodbye to 2007 by burning the 2007 calendars in our fireplace. We'll be enjoying a fire in the fireplace with the air conditioning on but what the heck. It will feel right to be done with 2007. Besides our son Paul dying in 2007, we had a slew of other fun challenges. So the way I look at it, 2008 will be a lot better. And it will. I don't mean to complain here because it just is what it is and there's no changing some things. Spiritually, Paul has been around a lot since his death. Amazing messages were received by us from him and we know without a doubt that he's doing great and hanging with us still. We have a lot to be thankful for.

So since this is a robot building blog, I'll get on with the latest breaking building news. R2 will be the major project of 2008. I plan on hitting that project hard toward the end of January when I get my Aluminum R2 JAG frame. Might even start working on some of the other parts earlier.

In case there's anyone reading this blog. I hope you have a great 2008 New Year and thanks for stopping by. 2008 is going to be better.

Robot power

B9's been tuned up and back to his old self. Originally I had two voltage regulators in his head ... one to power the crown motor and the red LED blinkers and the variable regulator to power the ears.

Last night I replaced the whole mess with one small 3v regulator the size of my thumb to power all of them. The ear motors go a little faster and the crown a little slower but it's simple and everything works well with that setup. While working on it in my garage last night a man drove by with his family and stopped so I gave him and his boys a tour of the robot house and they enjoyed seeing the robots.

The news segment about the robots got bumped at the last minute and they said it will appear next week. No worries .. it will happen when it happens.

The calm before the storm

You know the old saying. Be careful what you wish for. Well, the local news station will be running a story about our http://www.homelessrobots.org charity starting tonight and they will run it every hour for a day or so at 23 minutes past the hour.

On one hand I'm glad because we will get publicity to push the project and accomplish our goals to help feed the homeless tent city in our area. On the other hand, when you put your email address and phone number out there you never know what to expect. Especially on the issue of homelessness in our area. Oh well ... we'll soon find out. The good news is we already raised $1500.00 and that's before the story even aired.

Hopefully the new voltage regulators I ordered will get here tonight so I can finish the electronics repair/upgrade on my B9 and get him ready for a road trip.

Good tools

Another lesson learned this weekend while working on B9. I was trying to diagnose a short in my wiring and was looking to replace my voltage regulators in the testing phase. Unfortunately, my two voltage testers were both antique pieces of junk that had gone bad (yes the batteries were fresh). After wasting about 3-4 hours I finally found a nice new voltage regulator that was given to me by my brother-in-law a few years ago. I wish I would have pulled this out of the box earlier

Dusting off B9

Geez I can't believe how many things just kind of break down on a robot. B9 has been sitting for awhile so when I fired him up, there were quite a few big problems that I've been addressing. First one and most annoying was a loud hum in the neon/audio system. It turns out just separating some of the wires takes care of that problem. And then the ear motors stopped (still haven't figured that out yet) and one of the chest lights drove me crazy (turned out one of the 12v automotive flashers burned out.

So other than the ears, he's ready to go. I'll try the ears a few more times but that may just be one part that remains stationary.

Robot Road trips !!!

Well so far the http://www.homelessrobots.org idea seems to be taking off. It's turning into an effective way to earn money for our tent city homeless.
I just returned from the tent city and you can't imagine what seeing 250 tents in the woods is like when you imagine these are for people who have no place to live. And there was a line of people at the entrance signing up to sleep there that night and they're just about at capacity. It really is quite sad. I spoke with one man who was excited that today was his 34th birthday and he was moving out into his own apartment the next day and he had a good job also. He was excited about his future and a lot of it I'm sure came from him having a safe place to sleep at night while he got the details of his life worked out during the day. A friend that I went there with remarked that he was impressed that even though the place was pretty much full, there were very few people hanging around. Which makes us think they were out doing things like finding jobs, tending to health issues or miscellaneous chores.

The first robot was adopted today but the donor is still trying to determine which one they will bring into their corporate environment for the next couple weeks. One of the big TV stations in the area came out and interviewed the robots yesterday so the story will be running on the news next week. Should be interesting. Too bad I only have 4 robots completed (and a dozen others in various forms of completion). The incomplete projects don't count I guess.

Homeless Robots

Many of you may have read about the clash between the homeless, the city of St. Petersburg and the police last year. Images of police cutting up the homeless tents made national and world news and stirred emotion. Well, despite the problems of last year, Pinellas county and Catholic charities "Project Hope" compromised and came up with a partial solution to the lack of facilities for homeless people in this area. When I say partial, I acknowledge that this isn't the perfect solution but it does address a large chunk of it. You can't help wondering as you look over the hundreds of tents setup to house just a segment of the homeless in our area.

One of the challenges is to come up with enough funds to operate and also finding organizations willing to donate/prepare/serve meals to feed up to 250 people. No easy task and not cheap. So I decided to put the robots to work for this cause. More info can be found at http://www.homelessrobots.org

And of course ... this effort is in memory and honor of our late son Paul.

Sailing

Every weekend I consider the many robot projects that need to be completed in my garage. But then I cannot resist the lure of going out on the sailing kayak. It takes all my time but it's soooooo worth it.

Weekend before last, on Sunday the wind was completely dead but I still took it out into Tampa Bay to use the pedals. While out in the bay, I noticed a sailboat out in the middle of the bay so I pedaled out there just to be sociable. It turns out this 26 foot older wooden sailboat with 3 guys on it were stranded in the gulf as there was no wind. They were taking down their sails when I approached. Their engine was also on the fritz and they were ready to call sea tow. So as I sat in my little kayak looking up at them, I said I'll try to tow you under pedal power. After all the laughter, I talked them into throwing me a rope as I was curious if I could do it. This was a good size sailboat. So I wrapped the line around the bar behind me and started pedaling. Within minutes we were underway and I towed them back to the marina which was almost a mile away. It was a good workout and we sure got some looks from the people on the pier as we came up the channel.

This past Saturday and Sunday I also went out and the winds and weather were perfect. Yesterday I talked my wife into going with me and we had a perfect beautiful trip around to the tip of honemoon island in the Gulf of Mexico. For 30 minutes, we constantly had 5-6 dolphins on both sides of our boat while we traveled together. You could almost touch them they were so close and you can see them looking at us when they surface. It's an experience that is just too cool to put into words. The quiet gentle breeze pushed us along while the peace and serenity of being out there with the dolphins made it one of those experiences we will look back on in later years.

Instead of working on robots I now spend my tinkering time tweaking the sail/kayak. The barber hauler I designed and built cost less than $20.00 but has improved performance tremendously. Since I have my boat entered in a sailing regatta in Miami in January, this tweak is going to give me a nice advantage. I also modified the pedals with weights so they hang correctly. Some engineer at Hobie decided to remove them to save weight so every time you go to put your feet on the pedals, you have to pull them into position first. My modification has them working correctly again.

I've also fitted the boat with lights for night sailing and have a waterproof GPS to help me calculate speed in different sailing conditions. I'm also working on a splash inhibitor and ordered a hobie dodger which will keep the weather off me when it cools down around here. Fortunately it's been warmer than normal and nice and sunny around 80 degrees.

It really doesn't get much better than this.

Rudolph

To say the least, we're not in the holiday spirit this year but I did make an effort to put up at least one Christmas decoration. It's something that's been bouncing around my head for awhile now. RUDOLPH ! So I got up early before the wife and put it together and ran wires into the nose of my fiberglass Moose head with a superbright blinking red LED. The Santa cap and scarf added the final Christmas touch. It made the wife smile so that's the most I can hope for.

And that will be it for our decorations other than one small decoration I pulled out of our Christmas box that Paul made for us when he was 6. A little wooden pine tree with his name on it.