The first prototypes we put together used an Arduino, and it was with these first prototypes that we had many problems with the motors.

Despite the fact that it didn’t make it into the final model, it was a valuable tool for prototyping, developing and testing our ideas before applying them to the robot.

Last year, I and two of my friends, Ben James and Angus Ledesma, decided to create a Raspberry Pi powered robot for a Silver CREST project. I posted an overview of the project last July and have finally got around to converting the CREST report to a blog-friendly write-up!

My ageing hand-me-down MacBook (late 2007 - 1GB RAM) has been serving me well - it ended it’s OS X life in the Autumn of last year and has been running Linux Mint 17 ever since - we call it the MintBook. Linux has been a saviour. Making the shift was easy enough (having used GNU/Linux before - mainly in Raspberry Pis and web servers), the ease of software development has been greatly improved (bar Xcode of course!) and it has basically resurrected an almost dead laptop.

For my ongoing heating project I needed to be able to communicate with different nodes around the house. Wirelessly.