I had the opportunity to go to New York to help setup Rucker Park, Harlem for the Nike Basketball World Expo. Off course I had to go and see the big apple. I almost spent the whole week at the production site and when the show finally started, I sneaked out walked the city and finally got my iPhone 4, yess! To be true: it is not really nice what Apple puts you through in order to get one of these. On saturday I finally had some spare time and so I went to the Apple store on broadway, not far from my hotel. I was told to that off course I could buy an iPhone 4, no contract needed – only problem: they don’t have any. But I should come back next day. “I wouldn’t come too late. 7.45 AM is almost too late”. The next day, when I got there at about 7.20 AM the line was already around the next street corner. Some guys seem to have stayed there from 6 in the morning. Honestly, I can’t imagine that Apple has a shortage of iPhones. They keep their stock in stores low on purpose. Never the less after three hours I got one – just to find out, that it had no contract, but an AT&T Simlock. Thanks to iPhone dev team and redsn0w I can use it anyway and symio makes me feel far less ripped off than those Telekom prices and their way of doing business in Germany.

Last week I was on holiday and the rotten Telekom screwed up the account data of the house we stayed in. So no internet, partly bad weather outside, no sim card from symio yet… it felt just like in the 80s, where computing was mostly a single-man-on-an-island-thingy. Earlier I figured that you can make your own ringtones by converting an audiofile to aac and rename the resulting .m4a into .m4r. No Sidplayer installed and no HVSC in sight, I was somehow stranded with my idea to convert some old SID tunes to play as ringtone. Luckily I had a trial version of Rolands Liegers great Power64 that has a sound recording function and with the complete collection of Digital Marketing disks I was ready to go. In the end it turned out to be far more work than anticipated, mainly because I had no audio edit software as well. Audacity was on my mind, when I cut the tunes with the pro version of Quicktimeplayer, but here at home I found out that either the older version nor the new beta seems to work on my Snow Leo. So don’t judge the looping cuts on the tones to hard, as I had no real tools at hand.

Next part about Apple that I hardly understand. Why only 30 seconds for a ringtone? Steve, think of all the women searching for their iphones in their stuffed handbags…. this takes more than 30 seconds and repeating a tone over and over again gets on everybodys nerve. Anyway, here are some tunes I found worthy to convert. Some of my favorites are missing (No Lightforce, sorry Thomas) but the 30 seconds barrier is hard to keep when you have no real editing tools and so I keep the gems for the next release.

SID Ringtone Pack 1 (download 7.6mb)

1. Alleykat
2. Armageddeon Man
3. Breakthru
4. Cracker Mix
5. Dexion CoOp Intro
6. Double Take
7. Formular 1 Simulator
8. Frankie goes to Hollywood
   

SID Ringtone Pack 2 (download 9.8mb)

1. Game Over
2. Helikopter Jagd
3. Holiday Morning
4. Hunchback
5. Masters of the Universe
6. Max Headroom
7. Mission A.D.
8. Mutants
9. New Stars
   

SID Ringtone Pack 3 (download 8.9mb)

1. Phantoms of the Asteroid
2. Science 451 Intro
3. Ski Dance
4. Star Paws
5. Taipan
6. The Human Race
7. The Last Ninja – Palace Gardens
8. Times of Lore
   

SID Jingle Pack (download 1.2mb)

1. Arkanoid Start
2. Rambo II
3. decrunch noise 1
4. decrunch noise 2

So now go and bother your room mate, peer or who’s just around you, with your all new/old C64 sounds. Have fun!

It is not a good sign when I look things over and over again and again and don’t find any bugs. Not that I have trouble to keep the few things in my head, no, now I really suffer from concentration deficits and that is a big indicator for an overdue holiday. Why you ask? I ordered a new Roboduino from China. I couldn’t track any bug and logical solution seemed to order a new one to sort out potential failures on the board.

My inital test with the mutli-color LED failed right away and so I gave it a shot with LCD. Heureka! The LCD works as it is supposed to, showing a “hello world!” and counting the seconds. Mhhh… so why does the LED still not work. Maybe I am too blind to see. So I put the LCD back to the old roboduino and voila, it works too. It looks like I mixed cables or something… anyway, I found a nice little example of how to create custom chars on the LCD and made pixeled the Omnibotlogo. Here’s the link to the tutorial.

LCD check: go… LED check: no go… too stupid to wire three four cables in the right order. I really need some days off…

Bad news, everyone. All parts arrived, even the lost LCD was found in the post office. I came right on time before it got send back to Poland.

Taking the first steps with my Roboduino was real fun. I strated with the simple LED Demo and worked my way up till I got one RGB LED blinking through all the colors of the rainbow and even fading was easy. Next up was the LCD. I did all the soldering but before exposing it to the wrong current I wanted to messure the pins. Not a big thing, but I was a little too shaky that morning and made a short circuit.

My beautifully colorcycling LED went out, my Mac stated that the USB Device had been removed improperly and I was cursing. A quick reflash of the original demo that blinks the onboard LED showed, that flashing and some circuits still seemed to work. But neither could I get the LCD nor the RGB LED to work again properly. The absolute electronics noob got busted!

At first, I thought it would be the the regulator that went bust, but the more I test around it seems to be the processor itself that has some flaws with the PWM pins now. Pulsing works but my former setup and code just isn’t. Learning by burning is always a hard lesson.

I keep my fingers crossed that I am just too muddled to see the bug and so should you. If I will have to order another Roboduino from China, I will probably have no time when it arrives. Let’s just hope and enjoy the sun…

Searching through ebay I found most of the parts I would need to get my Omnibot running again.

First off all I choose a roboduino board – found one on ebay, origin:China, so keep your fingers crossed that this will hit my doorstep.

Further I got a big 6v motorcycle battery that has the same size as the original from Tomy. Luckily it was already charged and ready to run, as I don’t have a charger right now.

LEDs, Multicolor-LEDs for the eyes – ebay was my friend again.

And a tiny LCD for the front to select programms and as debug screen.

During the last week the majority of the stuff arrived. I don’t know wether the LCD or the Roboduino got lost in our post office. I found the notice that the postman tried to deliver something and I was not at home. In the post office the guy searched for 30 minutes without luck. Now I am waiting for a call… and waiting… and waiting….

Meanwhile I spent some time on the new front panel that would sit in robots balley where the old tape deck and clock was placed. Björn provided me some old forex board (some kind of thin plasic board) that I cut and shaped till it now fits perfectly. I tried to stay close to the original look of the old panel – very 80s and so it fits the overall look.
 

Considering the eyes I wired up the LEDS . I choose to hook them up parallel and the non-electronic guy that I am, I just burned the first one because of a forgotten resistor. But as the saying goes “Learning by burning” I got it working now. Both eyes are lit up equally and look really great.

I tested the drivetrain and first I was shocked as nothing moved. At work we have a big power supply and in the end it showed up that every motor (Omnibot got two) sucks a full Ampere. No chance for my tiny power supply to comply those needs. The battery, I got now does have 4Ah and this works just fine.

Hopefully the missing parts pop up soon and I can go on.

Back to ebay searching for sensors.

Resurrection of this blog… or call it just a new project. Time has become a rare good and so I did not write much lately. Around xmas I finished my big Hellomat cab. Now it is powered with an old xbox, a special vertical version of Coin-Ops (thanks BB) and it is running perfectly. It took me two controllers till I finally managed the soldering, but no one is perfect and this is another story that I will pick up when adding a spinner to it.

Since I was a kid I wanted an Omnibot. When it first came out around 1980, I wanted it so badly that it was the only entry on my xmas wishlist and I remember taking part in a contest held by German cartoon mag “Fix & Foxi” – main price was a Tomy Omnibot in all its glory. Guess, that week I did not catch much sleep, thinking about me winning this robot. Off course I didn’t win, but thanks to ebay I found one, some 25 years later and I tell you what: I am still as exited as I was back than.

This emotion has got a slight setback, when I opened the package from ebay. On the auction picture the little bot was looking good and the text said it need some slight fixes and it would be a real collectible. The reality was something else: cracks, wrong screws, moved bodyparts, black color on the bottom, missing rubber band… the list goes on; in short a complete wreck that looked as if it was kicked down the stairs to the basement. I was about to send it back but Nadine saw it and told me that I could not throw out a little, helpless creature like that. Guess she was right. The lady who sold it got a negative feedback for robot abuse (and not seeing anything wrong about her description) and I started to take it apart in order to fix things.

First off all some paint would be good to get rid of the yellowing parts. So this morning I took apart the arms and sprayed them with whit auto body paint. Now those look good and the complete body will be next up.

The transparent dome on Omnibots head got scratches all over and fat crack in the center. Probably I will take it to caos place tonight as he has a lot of experience with scratched plastics. He already suggested to grind it with fine sandpaper and use some special paste that will softly abrogate the plastic and polish it with at the same time. If everything works fine all scratches should be gone. Considering the crack… well, I think I can’t make this disappear but was thinking about putting a band-aid over it, in order to show what he has been put through.

There are a ton more things that need to be done.. did I mention that he (from now on he is male) is constantly screaming when turned on? I am no electronics guy but maybe it has something to do with the shielding of my used powerplug (battery was missing – off course) or an old capacitor is defect. Well,  I guess I will swap the old internas with something new, like an Arduino board or roboduino. Pinter75 has done it already and the outcome looks really good. The hardest part to replace will be the missing rubber band on Omnibots foot. Maybe I can use t-molding or something similar. If you got an idea feel free to post a comment or contact me directly.

I am new to the Arduino stuff and will first up concentrate on getting him optically sane.

One link that no Omnibot owner should miss is The Old Robots.com - tons of information, manuals, schematics and and and.

So happy Robanukka…

Packing up all the additional stuff we bought, was Nadines task and she mastered it. After checking out, we had a selfprepared small breakfast at the pier where Atlantic was throwing big breakers against the kaiwall, catapulting its spray five to six meter into the air and way above the wall. The sun was there and the whole scenery looked conciliable and friendly. A beer and an ice later, we went slowly back to our hotel, where we left our luggage. The nice lady at the reception called us a taxi to the airport and off we where. Good bye La Palma and let me say it with Arnies words: We’ll be back. Hasta la vista, baby!.

We climbed aboard our plane at dawn and we had plain view. During the flight we flew over several big cities, including Paris. I had a hard time using my pullover to keep the cabin light away from my lens but the plastic double glassed windows made a good shot impossible.

Almost our last day. We took the whole day and lingered through Santa Cruz. Basically we checked the supermercados for souvenirs. Later that day we went to a local tappas bar and had the best mojo of the whole holiday. Great, although it took some time to find it and realize, that it had places left in the back room.

Hiking boots on – chcek! Map – check! Target locked: Virgen de las Nieves. The ancient church outside, above Santa Cruz is the place to not go on Sundays. Sundays, the palmeros visit their patron, the holy Maria that saved the city during a volcano eruption in an effort of letting it snow. Every five years the Bajada de la Virgen de las Nieves is held, where the statue weighting 2 tons is carried to the city center.

Climbing out the baranco, Santa Cruz is located it, we passed the houses on top and climbed down on the other side again. The whole way there I had the smell of a big steak in my nose. Right beside the curch is one of the better parillas (grill restaurant) known for their good meat.

We had no luck. It looked like the whole city had come up here and was waiting in order to get table inside. As it was a scene from a movie, rain set in. We had no chance but climb down to Santa Cruz again and to be honest: steep cobble stone pavement in rain is not better to walk on than on loose chippings, hence, it took some time. Back in town siesta was in full swing and I was so hungry.

We had some noodles in the hotel… not quite the meal I had on my mind, but hey, you can’t always get what you want, right?

The first half of the day we wandered the streets of Santa Cruze. That afternoon the art and food market in Maso stood on our schedule. Maso was two towns away and we made first contact what it means to have no car on the island. No plan in sight and even the few shreds with information we found all said “about” and it was the first time that we really had to take a look at our watches – Las Tricias is timeless.

Finally we got on the bus and the next problem was when to get off again. No plan, no schedule, no signs at the station, nothing. Finally we found a young palmera that spoke english, but she wasn’t sure about our destination as well. Anyway, we got out the right place and found the market. A little smaller than the market in Puntagorda but again with great mojito. The local winegrower was giving away wine and roasted chestnuts – traditional for St. Martin on the Canaries. A little drunk, we climbed up that cliffy road to the bus stop. After an hour, we checked the schedule again just to find out that we had forgotten about the time shift. Canary Islands are 1 hour behind… so after a waiting for one and half hours in the cold and slight rain the bus arrived and we got home safely.

Karin started out to clean up our mess (we payed for it right when we booked) and we went down to Frohmuths Aloe Vera Cafe, had some fresh juice, said good bye to Ricardo and Amelie who where both working there. Than came the big goodbye. Luna was trailing along wherever we went. She seemed to know what was going on. For Nadine and me it was clear by now that this wasn’t the last trip to Karins little garden eden, but the next visitors were about to arrive and we had to return the rented car. In Santa Cruz we would have a room in a little hotel…. that was the deal.

After a small stop in Los Lanos – the secret capital of La Palma – we had to pass the three tunnels to get to the eastern side again. There dark clouds dropped from the mountaintops and we got another full rainbow, as if nature wanted to tell us that we are leaving the nice part of the island….. We arrived at dawn and parked the car. We considered Santa Cruz as a good bridge back to normal life, a quasi exit from the holiday to get accustomed to the city life again and it worked in every aspect.

Our room was smelling after mildew, a problem that all the other inhabitants seem to share. In effect everyone opened their windows, leading all to the same small backyard. In the morning, when the first alarm clock went off, everyone was awake. Welcome back to reality.

That evening we went to the nearby supermacdo and bought something to eat, went back to our fusty room and did not much exploring.