Anybody interested in taking part in techfest 2005? http://www.techfest.org Im making a robot for this techfest. One of my main objectives is to have a transmission system on the robot, because the robot has to climp steep inclines. I have designed a 2 speed automatic tranny, and I hope it works. Power to weight ratio and low-end torque are the key ingredients here. I didnt want to increase the power to weight ratio by cutting down on structural components....the robot has to have structural rigidity when it jumps down that incline. Tranny should solve the problem.

LATEST UPDATES: Will be working on a customised Fuel Injection system on a 92.2C.C 4 stroke engine. I am using an ancient 486 laptop, but that outta do the work. Shall be ripping off the carb off the engine first. Then comes the herculean task of designing or modding fuel injectors, polishing intake manifolds, shaving off the cylinder heads for an increased compression ratio and increased power output. Why on Earth would I be talking about an engine? I just realised that I was making a BIG robot, and I needed something more efficient when it comes to delivering power...the orignal Spiderbot was stripped down, it's legs taken off apart, and now I shall have em' replaced with mini pneumatic tires. I have also realised that I would be investing a lot of time and money in fabricating the F.I system, so as of now crude pulleys pull the throttle cable which is attached to the carb. I have never posted my pics because this robot of mine is constantly evolving, it started from a small thing that just pranced around like a toy to something that may give sports cars inferiority complex!!!!..... Why? Engine produces 7.4 horses at 7500 Rpm, and the approx robot weight is 40 Kgs. Power to Weight ratio is a cool:(7.4/40)*1000 = 185Bhp/tonne. The final gearing is ridiculously short, and naturally because it should be able to tackle any terrain/gradient....

I am using a Via C3 1Ghz processor, and Im pretty happy with it. Using a Lead Acid accumilator and an SMPS which I designed myself, I was able to run it for 73 minutes. Im running the motherboard without the negative supply(-12,- 3.3 are not connected, and I am using an AT power supply using an 810E board) , so as of now the serial port is inoperable. Does anybody have a circuit diagram for an SMPS? Most of the programming is done, so that I can operate the stepper motors for my robot through the serial port, and because a serial port uses negative voltage (-15V to trigger a 1 I think), I cannot operate the motors.. Has anybody used the Intel PXA-255 for building a robot? Spiderbot is still not ready as of now, lots of modifications yet to be done, shall post the URL soon when I get the time to make a nice site.

hey all; just installed kernel 2.6.2 on Redhat linux 9.0, and the latest kernel has made the PC fast indeed... MY RIG: AMD ATHLON XP 2800+, Asus A-7N8x delux, 1024MB DDR 400, Geforce Fx-5700, 80GB*2 RAID 0... SOMEBODY PLZ CERTIFY ME TO MASTER......;)

Yesterday I just managed to take out my good old 486DX- 66Mhz with 16 megs of Ram and a 500Mb hard drive......well it took me 16 hours to install windows 98, nevertheless it was fun......its been ages since I have played around with those legacy devices, experimenting with those wierd jumpers trying to prevent IRQ conflicts. The best part was when win98 was trying to swap the pagefile......the hard disk was groaning under excruciating pain.......then came the benchmarking......I ran sisoft sandra 2002, and in the memory benchmarks the rusty ol' thing gave me the int. bandwidth as 24Mb/ps and float of 16Mb/ps. even a 5.4Krpm HDD on a PIO-4 mode has a better transfer rate than the mem bandwidth of this junk that has been lying on my loft for the past 4 years.....