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I've worked with a number of their products and have found them to be well-designed and accompanied by clear, easy-to-comprehend instructions. And if you do get into a bind, their tech support is both informed and responsive. All-in-all, they're a top-notch company!

I've worked with a number of their products and have found them to be well-designed and accompanied by clear, easy-to-comprehend instructions. And if you do get into a bind, their tech support is both informed and responsive. All-in-all, they're a top-notch company!

in fact, i'm guessing most of the mindstorms were purchased by adults who had the interest but lacked the skills to go out and get a basic stamp with some servos...

I was employed as a video game technician for about a year until I was laid off. Prior to that I had been employed repairing standard consumer electronics for about 10 years. When I wanted to get up to speed on how most video games operated I found Randy Fromm's videos and Big Book very helpfull. Skeeball games in particular are very simple. I'm not sure that Randy has a video dealing with them directly. Essentially they are just switches, either mechanical or optical behind each hole and a board that tallies the score and send signals to the ticket dispenser to give the appripriate amount of tickets. You can buy ticket dispensers, coin accepters, or just about any arcade related device from Happ Controls. They don't have the lowest prics, but they carry just about everything. Amusement Warehouse was where we bought most of our stuff, but they will only deal with businesses. I am not sure of their web site, as I recall they only operated from a small catalog, but that was 3 years ago. The company I worked for owned about 30 Skeeball machines total and we were always willing to part with them for much less than you could build one. Of course they were hammered, but functional. Check with the operators in your area, many will be willing to sell. Even if it's really hammered you could pull all the electronics and build a nice new cabinet for it. You could very easily build a skeeball game using a Basic Stamp and some easily available switches. If you wanted to make it authentic with ticket dispenser they can be easily interfaced with theStamp. I think they hardest thing to recreate would be the scrolling display, if you want one of those I would consider buying a used machine. In my opinion you could have a working skeeball machine using a Basic Stamp and parts from Happ in a weekend. Hope this helps.

I forgot to mention that I've also got a basic stamp that I'm planning on attaching as well. The basic stamp is made by parallax. It has 16 I/O channels on it! GL 2 U!

Sure they don't have the power of some of the beefier solutions mentioned, but they're much easier to get into.

Actually, Parallax was doing this since what... 1992? They got TCP/IP stack for their BasicStamps too. But of course, their stuff runs a bit faster than 1MHz... :)

Pics here. It's kind of slow. Being slashdotted is not a good way to discover that your ISP does bandwidth limiting :-(.

Once the vacuuming brushes are removed the Roomba is much quieter and I am sure that battery life at least doubles. Chris.

Well you did want to know if anyone rolled their own.
If you are looking for PS/2 keyboard or RS232 serial output, check out the MEMkey board.

http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=2796 3
At quantities of 1 they are $40, but as they are programmable this can most likely do anything you need.

It has a 4x5 matrix (20 keys) that you wire to this board. Then you program it to push a value for each key out either the serial or PS/2 lines, you can plug this in directly to the keyboard input if thats what you need, or go the serial route if you want to make your own listener appliaction for it.

PDF datasheets are on their site.

Ive purchased many of these and they are the most handy things ever.
You can also buy keypads and ribbon cables from parallax as well if you dont mind a 4x3 or 4x4 telephone like pad.
Both have 0-9 * and #, and the 4x4 has the letters A-D.
If you make your own, the board can support up to 4x5 grids.

With a few other parts you can easily break out the matrix and wire each of the 20 keys up to pushbuttons to do almost anything.

If you use a serial protocol, and some latch ICs, you can string together 8 or so of these chips into one serial port on the PC.

My application was a MAME joystick that sent PS/2 keycodes that MAME would understand.

(BTW, for real arcade joysticks buttons and whatnot, check out www.happcontrols.com)

Hope this helps

Check out Circuit Cellar Magazine -- they are a steady stream of articles and advertisements covering just the thing you want to do.

While you're reading it, also pay attention to PIC Chips and Basic Stamps, which would be a great way to control your orbs without needing a PC (especially the cheaper PIC chips from someone like Microchip Technology)

If you're married to the PC concept, you'll also find advertisements for devices which are controllable via USB. Kinda nice for furure serial-less PCs.

Lastly, though it's a bit out of date at this point, take a look at "Controlling the World With Yor PC" by Paul Bergsmann (ISBN: 1878707159). Great stuff about parallel port interfacing.

Good luck!

As funny as it would be to make a comment about "glowing cyber balls", I will refrain.

As far as doing something like this, it's trivial. If you wanted to be old school, you could do something with a BASIC Stamp and good-old RS-232 out of a PC. Driving LEDs based on values given to it over serial is simple. You could probably drive four or five balls with one Stamp. You could even devise an overly-complicated protocol to communicate between the computer and the stamps. They could even be autonomous.. like adjusting color based on room temperature.

Or, look at A/D converters. They might be cheaper, if less geeky.

the Ambient Orb runs off a wireless network... no computer needed, and you can control it from anywhere in the world (theoretically). To manage that, you'd have to build an 802.11b -> relay interface, at least - if not a cellular one.

Now, assuming you don't want to muck about with that (and who does), your best bet would be to not use relays in the first place - they're loud, slow, and not gradual. Use a Basic Stamp from Parallax and write some code to output a PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) voltage to three different pins - one for each color. (Chances are you'll be using either one 4-pin, 3 color LED or 3 leds (red, green, blue). Infrared or UV leds could be interesting, but aren't recommended...) Then you can either leave the BASIC stamp connected to your serial port and controlled via DEBUG or SERIN (IIRC) commands from your host computer (and write some corresponding code for the host), or you can leave it standing alone and interface to it using any one of the who-knows-how-many add-on boards Parallax sells. (you might want to check out the Communications page - that modem looks like a good thing to try)

the Ambient Orb runs off a wireless network... no computer needed, and you can control it from anywhere in the world (theoretically). To manage that, you'd have to build an 802.11b -> relay interface, at least - if not a cellular one.

Now, assuming you don't want to muck about with that (and who does), your best bet would be to not use relays in the first place - they're loud, slow, and not gradual. Use a Basic Stamp from Parallax and write some code to output a PWM (Pulse Width Modulated) voltage to three different pins - one for each color. (Chances are you'll be using either one 4-pin, 3 color LED or 3 leds (red, green, blue). Infrared or UV leds could be interesting, but aren't recommended...) Then you can either leave the BASIC stamp connected to your serial port and controlled via DEBUG or SERIN (IIRC) commands from your host computer (and write some corresponding code for the host), or you can leave it standing alone and interface to it using any one of the who-knows-how-many add-on boards Parallax sells. (you might want to check out the Communications page - that modem looks like a good thing to try)

i went to the the mit website when they showcase the robots, link

i downloaded a few of the videos and was not that impressed. i am sure there is a lot of time and effort put into this, but i worked a summer camp where we taught kids a half of the things they were show casing... this company sells little robots and we can even buy little ifrared recievers imiters, light sensors, etc. we program it with BASIC to follow the light/dark, take commands from a remote control, pick things up. all this for just a 200bucks.

now, many of the "crown control" things were odviously a bit more complicated. but is it THAT special? sending signals that push away or get closer to other bots.. not that new.

one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck. Me and friend tried to make a linux compiler for it, and got no support from the company, no techdoc, nothing. (we were not surprised)

i went to the the mit website when they showcase the robots, link

i downloaded a few of the videos and was not that impressed. i am sure there is a lot of time and effort put into this, but i worked a summer camp where we taught kids a half of the things they were show casing... this company sells little robots and we can even buy little ifrared recievers imiters, light sensors, etc. we program it with BASIC to follow the light/dark, take commands from a remote control, pick things up. all this for just a 200bucks.

now, many of the "crown control" things were odviously a bit more complicated. but is it THAT special? sending signals that push away or get closer to other bots.. not that new.

one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck. Me and friend tried to make a linux compiler for it, and got no support from the company, no techdoc, nothing. (we were not surprised)

i went to the the mit website when they showcase the robots, link

i downloaded a few of the videos and was not that impressed. i am sure there is a lot of time and effort put into this, but i worked a summer camp where we taught kids a half of the things they were show casing... this company sells little robots and we can even buy little ifrared recievers imiters, light sensors, etc. we program it with BASIC to follow the light/dark, take commands from a remote control, pick things up. all this for just a 200bucks.

now, many of the "crown control" things were odviously a bit more complicated. but is it THAT special? sending signals that push away or get closer to other bots.. not that new.

one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck. Me and friend tried to make a linux compiler for it, and got no support from the company, no techdoc, nothing. (we were not surprised)

How about making a PS/2 conversion of a Stenotype but drop in a PIC like the BS2-IC (if your lame like me) that will convert the shorthand to all the words... using an I-PAC triggered by the BS2 to actually send the data to the keyboard port. Muhaha.. Muhahaha!!!

The one big issue is that the programming environment is set up to run under DOS/Windows. I'm guessing Wine may be able to run it, but I've never tried. If you can get over your distaste for DOS/Windows (let's face it: most of us have at least one dual boot machine anyway), I can not recommend BASIC Stamps highly enough. They're true geek toys without being childish.

Come on, you know you wanna get some...

I'll bet 1/5 of the readers do have Mindstorms kits lying around...And the rest are getting them for xmas. FWIW, you can get serially addressable H-bridges and stepper drivers almost as easily as servo controllers. It's easy to go nuts with these once you have them.

Noone has these lying around, but those omnidirectional wheels are something new-ish in the fairly staid field of homebrew robotics, and would be fun to noodle with whether driven from a PIC or an Athlon. Good for mazes, I'm sure.

The same foam-tape-and-superglue chassis could apply, but with a Basic Stamp II or (better and multitasking) BasicX-24, you wouldn't tie up your Palm--you could even use the Palm's IR to interact with the beast.