Wednesday, December 14, 2011

A Different Type of Development


Decided to switch up my development type a little bit.  I picked up an Arduino today from Radio Shack and got back into some robotics stuff.  I had previously used the Parallax Propeller and had a lot of fun, but recently I had read a lot about the Arduino and it looked really interesting.  Radio Shack had a nice setup for ~$80 which I picked up.

So far I really like it.  I was able to get a little robot that I had frankensteined before up and running in it in a few hours.  You can see it there in the background.  I'm using an H-Bridge (SN75441) to control the rear motor and turning motor.  I also have a Parallax Servo up front that moves an Ultrasonic Distance Sensor around to find the closest object.  The little dude will just drive around and find the closest thing.  Then drive up to it and stay there.

It just wants to hug things :]

This isn't very AstroMiner related, but it is an area I'm interested in.  I have a lot of other projects that I don't post much about.  I also have a project for my website, http://www.pwned.com, that I need to start and finish soon.

On the AstroMiner front, I'm fairly certain that I fixed the bug where blocks were changing their drawing locations.  For some reason I was pulling in a new block object every single time I added a block to the world.  Once I fixed that and only pulled a new block object if the current block is null, the bug seemed to go away.  I'll continue to test it to confirm.  Next on the list is player inventory and a faster way to save/load worlds.

I probably won't do as much dev work starting next week due to the holidays.  I'll be back full swing come the new year though.