My third book is released! Learn what you'll need to know in order to become an embedded engineer.

Check out my second book; learn practical stuff about building robots and control systems around Linux PCs and the Atmel AVR.

My first book gives you all the intro you need on developing 32-bit embedded systems on a hobbyist budget.

Diary Segment: 2007, May 16-31

Entries are shown in chronological order; scroll down to see later material.

May 20, 2007

On the topic of school, I have created a web page to show how "far" I've come (really, how depressingly far I have to go). At this rate, I won't finish all this nonsense until 2010; I'm planning to try and do some additional coursework as soon as possible to speed that up a bit. It's really irritating; the actual workload is quite trivial, but I can't find time [or money] to do it at a sensible speed.

Much of the new fun project stuff centers around car repair. I have been disassembling and cleaning the new transmission for my Scout, and in the progress decided to do a full rebuild on it, clean off every speck of grease, and paint the housing. I didn't originally plan to do this level of work on it, but while I was taking it off the transfer case I forgot to disconnect the output shaft, and so when I pulled the two pieces apart everything went "sproing" inside the trans.

As it turns out, that was really a blessing in disguise. There were a couple of broken rollers in the needle bearings, and so much muck floating about inside the case that really the front and rear bearings ought to be replaced as well. Plus, the second gear is quite worn, so all in all a full rebuild is definitely called for. Further information to be posted on the Scout page as I get time to write it up. The picture you see here is an intermediate picture; I had done some washing of the casing, and disassembled most of the gearing, but it has come a lot further now; the case is totally stripped out, and all the grease and rust has been removed from the outside.

In even more exciting news, I'm about to get a second Scout for parts. This is a luscious prospect that has me licking my lips every time I think about it. The great thing about having a spare of everything is that you can work in detail on any given part without taking the truck off the road; once you finish one part, you can swap it out and the only downtime is however long it takes to remove the old part and install the restored part. If all goes well, Parts Scout will arrive tonight.

Work on my fourth book is proceeding nicely. On 5/24 I should receive the first batch of PCBs for one of the circuits listed in that book. This is the 527 Camera Controller / Telemetry Encoder. I have not yet created a web page for this project, but the other book-related circuit, Polyceph, does have a page.

May 25, 2007

In more interesting news, I've received and started to disassemble my first parts Scout, so I am officially a collector!

PCBs for the 527 project also arrived yesterday, so work on Book 4 is proceeding. And in still more electronics-related news, I took this coming Tuesday off (Monday being Memorial Day, of course), so I hope to have my next PS3 article totally finished and ready to submit.