Robotics
My Robot Website
I’ve updated my robot website the past month, www.scottsbots.com has a new look, and I’ve even added a store. You should also checkout a few new robots or robot videos.
Scott’s Bots – Back to custom code.
I enjoy WordPress for ScottPreston.Com, but for Scott’s Bots.Com, I’ve decided to go with my own custom version of the web site. The reason is that I wanted to do too many things with the site and was forced to look for so many so-so plug-ins. So rather than do that I just coded what [...]
How To Hack A Servo
I’ve put together this video showing you how to hack a servo. It’s great for those that want to buy an in-expensive standard servo and convert it to a continuous rotation servo. For more video’s like this, go to www.roboticsed.com.
Thinking More About Robot DVD
I have actually started to think a lot more about my robot DVD so much so that I am starting work on it. Check-Out RoboticsEd.Com for more information.
One Project – A Robot Building DVD
I think that this year I am going to try and limit myself to one project at a time, rather than starting three or four and doing them all partially and then getting frustrated at the results. The whole multi-tasking concept is dead for now. My thinking today is that if something is worth doing, [...]
Java Media Framework on Ubuntu Linux
It’s been years bug I have finally figured out how to solve my Java Media Framework issues on Linux/Ubuntu. Basically it requires an X11 environment/framebuffer to work. To get things to work I installed the following: sudo apt-get install xvfb Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x24& export DISPLAY=localhost:1.0 run your java program. So if you want [...]
Linux Webcam Success and A Shop
I have managed to scrap JMF (Java Media Framework) and instead created a roll-my-own JNI web cam capture with C and Java. So far so good, but it only works with a few older web cameras and performance is not optimized. I also have a new shop. Now I have a place where I can [...]
Creating a Pause Method in Java
I use this often in my robotics code. The reason is simple, it takes the robots time to do things and I need to wait for a microcontroller to perform some action, like get a sensor reading, or move a certain distance, or change heading. It’s very simple, but I will add more robotics code [...]
Text To Speech (TTS) with Ruby and PHP
I was working with some scripts for having my PC talk. The first one is in Ruby: require “win32/sapi5″ include Win32 v = SpVoice.new v.Speak(“this is the easiest thing to do since I have started working with ruby..”) Now this one in PHP: <?php $tts = new COM(“SAPI.SpVoice”); $tts->speak(“this is a test”); ?>