The wheels arrived Nov 30th, which was quite a delay from when I had expected them. Then they sat in the box for several days. November and December are such busy months. That's not something I'm fond of.

We did finally get around to putting the wheels on the bot, but haven't wrote the code needed to make it drive around. Hopefully next weekend that will happen, since I'm leaving tomorrow morning to travel for work, and won't be back until Friday.

Originally I had wanted to build this robot and take it to the December meeting of YAAARC on December 12th. Unfortunately, I'm going on travel for my work all week that week, so we won't be able to go. So some of the urgency for getting it done quickly is gone.

In the meantime, I got a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set for my birthday. Yes, a 38 year old man can get toys for his birthday. In fact, I prefer toys as gifts. I assembled the "quickstart" robot from the manual, and hopefully Alex will have a chance to program it while I'm away.

I installed the software on both of our Macs. Of course, it runs better on the MacBook Pro, since it's much faster, but the Mac MIni works ok too. I configured the bluetooth to connect to the Mini, and that worked quite well. I've never had much luck with bluetooth before, having tried it with mac-to-phone and mac-to-mouse, and it always seemed flaky. The NXT, however, connected easily, and has worked every time.

When I get back from my trip I want to write a program that uses the distance sensor to wander around. Perhaps I'll need to add a distance sensor to the homebrew bot too.