Robot building again ?????

For some reason my robot building passion seems to be slowly returning. For the last 6 months I haven't felt much desire at all to work on the robots ... so I didn't. Because it's supposed to be fun.

Since our older son Jeff moved to the Virgin Islands we've been appointed to get rid of his 3 tons of junk and his monster truck. So my garage is in chaos and between selling his stuff on craigs list and moving it to our garage from storage, there just hasn't been much room in the garage for building (and the sailing takes a good chunk of time too). But the last couple days I've been able to get the garage back into a state where I can again do some building.

Also a recent talk with one of the giants in robot building ... and the builder of the giant robot ... I started thinking seriously about building again. The person I talked to recently is Jamie from "The Giant Robot Project". Kind of like the giant spider robot from Wild Wild West. Jamie is unlike anyone I've ever known on this planet. He is a genius builder of anything he puts his mind to. And he has a place in the mountains of Vermont that is only accessible by foot and he lives "off the grid". He built a very cool 3 story Dome home on that mountain and is building a massive workshop up there using his own hand made sawmill that is creating the wood for this workshop. Talk about a challenging undertaking

Another thing that makes Jamie so unique is his giant robot project. He's building this massive robot using donated parts or just junk from a junkyard as well as parts he scrapes up on an almost nothing budget. If you're looking for some interesting videos to watch and some fascinating pictures and reading, I encourage you to visit his website which is at http://jamius.com/Robot/Robot.html He's not a typical person but definately my type of person.

Jamie is in the Tampa Bay area for a few months and I hope to link up with him soon to talk robots and do some sailing.

On the subject of robot building, A couple guys in the R2 club are almost done testing a superb piece of engineering that they will be offering the club members. It's some computer circuit controller boards that will make R2 come alive in a very integrated way. Hard to explain but here's a video that shows the J.E.D.I. control system in an early test phase. http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CCEkPSlLFVo