Jeff and I have just announced that we’ve made Formica 2 kits available for order. You can pre-order them in the newfangled xGoat webshop, and this will guarantee that the kits are shipped to you by the 22nd of February. The kits come with all the surface mount components already soldered on the PCB, so you can get to programming your robots as fast as possible. Some soldering is still required to attach the motors, battery, antennae and photodiodes.
You’ll also find the protopack in the webstore, which is a backpack (an extension board which plugs into the new hack connector on top of Formica 2) with a 1.27mm prototyping area on it. This will be useful for quickly hacking together extensions for your Formica robots.
Luckily I managed to get in at the right time and bought all the MSP430F2274 microcontrollers that we need for these chips. There’s some kind of international shortage of these at the moment. If you are in desperate need of these chips, email me and I might be able to sell some to you.
Jeff and I have been working hard on the Formica project in our spare time (honest!), but unfortunately we’re not going to make our previously announced deadline of the 26th. Sucks, I know. This means that we’re not going to be doing a workshop at 26C3. Sorry. We will be at 26C3 though, so do come and say hi!
Why the delay? We’re not just shipping the same old design as before. We’ve added a hack header to the robot, allowing the robots to be easily extended. We’re quite excited by the extensions that people will come up with. We’ve also trimmed down the number of components on the board further (yes, it was hard to believe there were any, but turns out we did miss some!). All of these changes meant that we had to do a prototype run, which obviously increased the hours that we had to put into the project.
I’m not going to say exactly when I think the robots will be ready, because I don’t want to let people down again! However, I think I am safe in saying that they will be available within the next few months.
Amused when pasting an URL into an IM window and it turns out that the URL fills most of the window? Here’s a utility that’ll guarantee all URLs you send are much longer than they need to be. Read on!
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