Damn, I guess there was an earthquake here this morning. I wish I would have been awake for it. I've never been through one of those. I probably should have tried to get an earlier flight back today. My plane doesn't leave until like 6 something and I don't have shit to do until then.
Did you guys know that it costs $1200 to file a patent, not including lawyer fees. Someone's probably patented battle robots before anyways.
Did you guys know that it costs $1200 to file a patent, not including lawyer fees. Someone's probably patented battle robots before anyways.
What I used to make the cat attacking robot was the Vex Robotics Starter Kit. It's still toy robotics, but the pieces are all metal and you can hook up to 8 motors to a robot. You can test the robots directly with the transmitter, remote control car-style. For autonomous mode, bust out the $50 Programming Kit and program your robot using the C programming language.
For a while, I was working every night on a super-secret robot that would paint poster-size pictures by itself, but I had trouble building an even track for it to run along like a monorail. Slight inconsistencies and bumps caused it to wobble and paint shitty pictures. The engineering part of building robots was harder than I thought.
The book I mentioned wouldn't help you learn C at all. The book uses Ruby, which is for website-oriented programming.
Anyway, it's fun. Check out the kits.