Robert Taylor: Robert's SPOT blog

Friend of the SPOT team and Sun Labs employee Mark Koch has made available for purchase his breakout board for the eDemo Board. With this you get easy access to all the pins and inputs without the worry of hosing your eDemo Board. The board also has a serial connector and connectors that allow you to directly connect vEx or standard servos.

 

 See Circuit Monkey for more details.

Today after lunch I happened to fancy a milkshake and of course when you are on University Avenue you must stop by the Palo Alto Creamery for one. It is my opinion that it is the best milkshake around.

  

 

Bought a Luxeon V LED from SparkFun it is incredibly bright.

Luxeon V LED from das bobby 2000 on Vimeo.

Last weekend John and I went cycling in San Francisco. John bought a bike while he was here and I rented one. We started in Fisherman's Wharf, over the Golden Gate bridge and up to the Marin Headlands, back over the bridge and through Pacific Heights, then Golden Gate park and back to Fisherman's Wharf.

It was a pretty long ride and we saw a lot but more importantly we stopped at the Ben and Jerry's in Fisherman's Wharf where I had a Chocolate Shake.

It was pretty nice but I think the Jack in the Box one is a lot nicer.

Just got the Metal Gear Solid 4 soundtrack, it's pretty epic. The sound system in the big room is pretty sweet as well.

 

I went to Jack in the Box again today with Lach and got a large chocolate milkshake. It was $3.24, more expensive than the lemonade, but I think it was nicer.

I went to Jack in the Box to get a drink and got a large lemonade for $2. That's pretty cheap.

 

The Ravenswood site is several miles away from the Labs which is too far for a single patch of SPOTs so we need a way of sending and receiving data from the site. The picture below shows the distance between the Labs and Ravenswood site which is next to the bridge in the distance. The easiest and cheapest way of getting data to and from the site would be wifi. The only problem with using wifi would be the need to put repeater stations in the ground every so often because a single access point won't reach. However, the Labs have bought a couple of Ubiquiti Network's PowerStation 2 to boost the wifi signal so that we can run a wifi network from the Labs to Ravenswood. On Friday we tested the link between the Labs and one of the Director's houses over 8 miles away and got about 4Mb/s without any major tweaking.

Hello again. In my last post I briefly introduced myself, now I'd like to take the time to explain in more detail what I'll be doing during my internship. Amongst other things, I'll be working with the SPOT team on the Yggdrasil Data Collection Framework. This framework is an effort within the SPOT team to create a programming framework that enables people with various levels of programming experience to easily create end-to-end applications i.e. all the code from visualising and storing the data on to the code that runs on the SPOTs. I'll be working on the SPOT side tools i.e. the code that runs on the SPOTs. This code will hopefully be used in SPOT deployments at the Cocobolo Nature Reserve in Panama and at Ravenswood in Menlo Park, CA as part of the salt marsh reclamation project. I'll be posting more about my work as its completed.

Hello all! My name is Robert Taylor and I've recently returned to Sun as an International Student Intern on the Sun SPOT team. Over the next few months I'll be posting what myself and other interns on the SPOT team are doing.