Oh, Mega Man 9, why must you hurt so good?
I actually made it all the way to a robot master and I considered that a major accomplishment.
One way trip
Yesterday I picked my brother up at the airport (San Jose) then drove him up to Marin. I then left him there and drove back home. Although this sounds like some sort of sibling abandonment, he managed to procure transport back to Southern California, although at considerable expense.
You see, he wanted a very specific model of car — an Infiniti FX35 if I remember correctly, maybe EX35, but with a specific combination of packages he couldn’t find anywhere down in SoCal — so he made arrangements to buy it up here. The car can almost drive itself, between the cruise control that uses sonar to determine distance to and speed of the car in front of you to the camera that recognizes lane lines and warns you if you drift (and even does slight corrections to keep you in the lane).
As a side note, this sounds scarily similar to the work that my AI professor was doing 10 years ago when I was at Berkeley. I wonder if it’s the same technology.
It also has true iPod connectivity, although it didn’t work perfectly with my iPhone, it connected but didn’t charge. This seems to be a common occurrence with cables that weren’t designed for the iPhone 3G. I did have to chuckle at the digital MPG meter that only went up to 30, though. If it seems like I’m talking more about the car than anything, it’s because we were stuck in the car for more than half an hour while we waited for the finance guy to finish with the previous customer, so we both became very familiar with the car. Well, it seems like my brother already did his research and knew everything about it beforehand.
Although it was overcast when we drove up, by the time I drove back down it was a beautifully clear day in SF. I don’t know if it was $6 bridge toll worth of beautiful, but it was still a very nice day.
Victory!
It works! I updated the Flickr gallery with some shots of it working.
The right arrow’s wire is a bit loose, when I first screwed everything in to the enclosure, it wasn’t working, but taking it back out and putting it back in fixed it. I hope it doesn’t spontaneously stop working after time.
I made such a mess on the kitchen table for this project…
After one evening…
So my progress so far:
– “Liberated” the control box from the remainder of the soft pad, rendering the soft part useless.
– Used a recently purchased Dremel to drill into the top of the control box, making room for the output port, select button and start button.
– Hot glued the port and buttons into place (although one of the buttons doesn’t really want to stay, I made the hole a bit too big.
– Soldered most of the wires I need to the control board. The guide I was going by was for a third party Mad Catz DDR pad, which had nice, easy to connect to solder points with posts and all. The actual Konami version is harder, as there are very tiny holes and no posts, so I had to strip down the wires down to half of their threads, slip them through the holes and solder them to the flat part of the board.
– Verified the connections of the wires to various parts on the control board with continuity tester.
Next up is soldering up the last two wires (select and start) to be used for the switches, then soldering the other half of all the wires to the port and switches. I’m still a bit unsure about the stability of the wires, they are awfully fragile now that only half of them are used. I’m going to use electrical tape to tape them to the board after they all are soldered in, hopefully that will keep them from shifting too much and snapping off.
This doesn’t bode well…
I do believe the Republicans may have just buttoned up the election right there…
My next project
So I don’t remember if I posted or not about it, but I bought the updated control box for my Cobalt Flux hard DDR pad and was disappointed to find that the XBox connectivity was only for the original XBox, not the XBox 360. I did some research online, and it turns out that many people are disappointed about this, and that a solution exists, it just involves a bit of breaking apart a cheaper dance mat and solder and perhaps a resistor or two. I just ordered a bundle that has an XBox 360 mat in it, and it’ll be a sacrifice for the greater good.
Now I need to find my soldering iron…
The joys of home ownership.
The refrigerator was leaking whenever we tried using the water dispenser, which made the water dispenser have very low pressure and was potentially causing water damage in the back, so I called GE repair.
$99 just to show up. (which I knew, and was up from $75 since the last time this happened, which was for the microwave and I ended up only paying the $75 and opted not to pay for the labor which would have cost more than a new microwave).
$125 for labor.
$18 for the new tube.
At least this time it was mostly worth it, as refrigerators are a bit more expensive to replace than microwaves. And yay, 50% of it is tax deductible so that’s like 20% off right there.
Sometimes, your first guess is right.
I saw a man in the grocery store talking to himself. I figured in this day and age, he was probably just talking on a BlueTooth headset. So I looked on one ear, then the other.
Nope, he really was talking to himself.
New style!
I have finally cleaned up the CSS of my journal/friends page to 1) not waste so much space and not use tables anymore and 2) look decent on the iPhone.
I hope it’s not horribly broken in some way.
Bah, humbug
I am disappointed to find that, in addition to Mac OS 10.5.3, I need an Intel based Mac to program for the iPhone.
Guess that ain’t happening anytime soon.