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During the Robojoust workshop this last saturday at the SparkFun headquarters, Nat and I decided to join the activities and build our own Ardubot. We came to the workshop a little late, so Nat and I had to catch up with the rest of the group. Nat soldered and assembled the platform like a pro, while I hacked a Simon game into a XBee controller for the ardubot. In no time at all, we basically constructed a small RC car, with a fun LED lit controller!

This can be done completely with SparkFun parts. Follow this tutorial for the Ardubot parts. In addition, you will need these parts:

Simon Game
2 x Xbee 1mW
2 x XBee Explorer Regualted
2 x LiPoly Charger
2 x 6Ah LiPo Battery
5V Step-Up
And maybe some:
F/F Jumper Wires
Male headers

Arduino users: I did not use arduino libraries, the code is written in C and compiled with programmers notepad. Here is the code.

Really early this morning there was a geiger counter jam on the Frow Show 91.1 New Jersey. Here is the show.

I was tipped off on this show by famulus from prometheusfusionperfection.com. Check out his website, he is building an open source fusion reactor!

Here is some odd geiger activity after he created a fusion bubble.
 

Here is the stable air plasma.

After speaking with famulus, something strange happened to his geiger counter.

While prototyping for the Geiger counter I came across arcing, but never saw something like this. I also received some interesting information from a customer regarding the end window and it susceptibility to damage, which could of played a part in this beautiful error.

UPDATE 12-11-09: After speaking with the manufacturer of the Geiger tube, he told me you are not even supposed to touch the end window, since it is made our of mica, a very flacky and brittle mineral.

Due to the lack of entrants in the Robojoust competition, SparkFun canceled the activities. Instead, we got an amazing demo from Chris Rojas' physical computing robot tracking installation.

The robots are tracked using IR LEDs and an IR camera from above. Then the positions of the robots are compiled using a combination of open source software and sent to the projector which can add visual affects to the positions of the robots.