Not had much time to work on bot projects lately, but having met the deadline for a recent project my thoughts are starting to turn back to what I can do next.

My Basic Stamp robot has been outfitted with an aluminium chassis. It uses a Board of Education so that I can easily experiment with new behaviours and sensors. I recently fitted it out with a couple of IR diodes and receivers. They seem to work, but I wonder whether the diodes I bought are too low power as they only seem to detect obstacles at a distance of around 10-15cm.

I'm intending to use the test platform as a learning tool while I assemble my ideas for a mini-sumo bot.

The company I work for (in Sweden) is moving and I just rescued an old SCSI scanner from the skip. It even has a transparency scanning cover. From the look of it I can salvage several stepper motors (including at least one matched pair), some interesting gears and a couple of very nice toothed rubber belt drives plus a lot of other very useable electronics. I haven't played with stepper motors yet so I'm looking forward to getting the scanner home and ripping it to bits ;-)