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Jeff K. is the most amazing and interesting person I’ve met.

I needed to write a blog post – here it is.
Kevin

The last few weeks have been interesting. As we approached the end of the 1st quarter of school, it seemed like the teachers rushed to get as many grades in as possible by assigning hours upon hours of homework and cramming in tests as we the students struggle to keep afloat. Oh well, that’s life and I’m me.

It would seem in football, that we now just got the passion to really play the game with intensity last Friday, October 17. We played Lowell, a team that is a class or two above us and will probably go to play in the state finals in their division. We lost, but we as a team improved our play to a level that I had a doubt that we would ever reach. After a rough week of practice, we played very well and will use the experience of last night’s game to better ourselves and prepare us for sectionals.

In other news, I spent a few more dollars on my robot project, which still remains incomplete. I do intend this weekend to create the main control box. It will house the Arduino controller, the LCD screen, two push buttons, the master power switch, the logic battery, and a status light. It’s a bit much to fit into one small box, but I think it can be done. I need to order 4 more h-bridges to give my robot a full range of motion, until then, I will have it go forwards, and reverse – turning to one side in the backwards direction. When the program receives a signal from one of the bump switches as it is going forward, it will stop and reverse-turn until it hits another object. That is until I can get another set of h-bridges to control the other motors properly.

Good luck,
kevin

Although I spent much of today (Sunday) sleeping and doing homework, Saturday was a bit more eventful. While the parents were away at a school fundraiser, a couple of friends and I pranked my neighbor friend. We woke up this morning to this:

Robot Circuit 01I finally figured out how to wire the h-bridge correctly…
Here’s what my bot looks like so far…

Hey, if you ever want to get stuck in dependancy hell, use Windows. I needed to install a sound card driver on a clients computer, but first I needed to download .NET Framework. Ok, easy enough, just go to microsoft.com and search for .NET and download it.

Wrong! Of course you have to be a Genuine Windows Advantage Users to even see the page. Then once you download what ever the crap it is, I can see the page. Ok. Wait… I have to download Windows Installer 3.1. Alright, just open another window to download that.

After installing Windows Installer 3.1 and the .NET Framework only after downloading the Genuine Advantage P.O.S., I continue with my driver install.

But wait! I must have Microsoft’s framework for the audio component in XP before the driver is even considered for installation…. AHHHH!!!!

As you can see it was very labor intensive to do a simple task, such as installing a driver. In Linux, I usually don’t have to worry about the drivers because many of them are built into the kernel. And as for dependencies – Linux has come a far way since then – maybe someone should take a look at how the Linux users do things?!!?!