Aimee and I moved to the west side of Charleston - a scary place! In the two years that we lived there, an elderly woman was murdered on our street, my car was totalled (as it sat parked on the side of the street), we had neighbors of questionable employment, and a crazed druggie ran through our yard, destroying our pool and fence!
Let me back up a few years... In 2003 I was curious if there was anyone in the Kanawha Valley who knew anything about robotics - someone who might be able to point me in the right direction. So I did a Google search for "robotics and Charleston, WV", which returned one result - the personal website of a man named Neil who was a computer programmer for the state of West Virginia. I contacted Neil, and he agreed to meet me in the food court at the Kanawha Mall. Neil brought with him a stack of electronics catalogs and a piece of wood with metal door hooks screwed into it to illustrate the concept of an H-Bridge motor driver. The meeting lasted for about an hour, and we parted ways. It was more encouraging than it was helpful, but I appreciated the gesture.
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| Neil Chakrabarty |
So here it was five years later (2008), and I hadn't heard from Neil since that day at the mall. Now that I was working 8AM to 4PM, I had some free time in the evenings. I was ready to jump back into developing my skills at electronic circuit design. Aimee and I were new to the area, and I didn't have any friends nearby. I yearned for some geeky comradery - plus, I wanted to be a resource for all the nerdy kids out there who wanted to learn about robotics (like I had as a teenager). The idea struck me to start a local robotics club, so I did another Google search and found Neil again. He was interested! :) We invited all the geeks we knew, and we sent a bunch of letters and flyers to local high schools. The West Virginia Robotics Club was born! We designed a logo and made silk screen T-shirts in my basement. Monthly meetings were held at the Kanawha County Public Library starting in October 2008. Of all the schools we sent letters to, only four students (from Nitro High School) showed up - and attended for two or three months. After that, the club lasted for about a year or so with 4 or 5 dedicated members, though we had twenty-some members in all. The meetings were really cool at first; members brought the electronics projects they were working on and showed them off, but it eventually turned into a group of old men sitting around a table trying to talk over each other. ...Things took a turn for the better when a new member named Bill offered to move the meetings to his lab at West Virginia State University. Bill is a retired electrical engineer and teaches electronics at WVSU. He is extremely knowledgeable about everything from vacuum tubes to microprocessors and has been one of the best friends and mentors that I have ever had! :) The club continued for another year or so at WVSU but eventually fizzled out. We make attempts at resurrecting it now and then. Neil, Bill, several others, and I are still good friends and get together every couple of months.
In the October 2008 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine, Vern wrote about a neat project called the "Peanut Butter Monster Detector". It consisted of a used peanut butter container with a Basic Stamp microprocessor, servo motor, different colored LEDs, and a voice recorder module inside (like you find inside those annoying birthday cards). The motor turned an LED around and around as if it was scanning the room for monsters, and then it would announce, "Scan complete; no monsters detected!" to ease children's fears of boogy men under their beds. I thought that it was really neat and wanted to make one for Ethan, who was afraid of monsters at that time. The article included a parts list, but it lacked the computer code to program into the Basic Stamp. So I contacted Vern for the code. He e-mailed back and was very nice. We exchanged phone numbers and started calling each other about once a month to discuss our various electronics projects. I meantioned to him that I might be interested in writing an article about my senior design project (solar tracker) and submitting it to the magazine - and asked if he could get me in. He told me how to go about it (format, pictures, sidebars, resources, acknowledgements, etc) and even proofread my first draft. Then in June of 2009, he called me in a panic and said that he wasn't going to be able to meet his deadline that month - and was I ready to submit my article(?). I was! My article was featured as the cover story in the August 2009 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine, and I became an internationally published author!!! Plus, I got paid $450 for it! I have received (and still do two years later) scores of e-mails from around the world about that article! Best of all, Ken Gracey (Vice President of Parallax - maker of the Basic Stamp and the largest hobby electronics company in America) e-mailed me to congratulate me on the article and thanked me for the kudos to Parallax! :) Awesome!
On April 25th, 2009, I took the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam at the Civic Center in Charleston. I studied for months for this 8-hour test! Three months later I received a letter informing me that I passed the test and was now officially an Engineer In Training (EIT). In 3 more years, I can take the PE (Professional Engineer) exam and become a professional engineer.
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| Microchip PIC16F628A microprocessor |
It was also in 2009 that my friend Bill introduced me to Microchip PIC microprocessors - the single biggest jump so far toward my goal of designing simple, affordable robots! PIC chips, as they are called, have been around for 30 years or so and cost less than $1 each (far cheaper in bulk quantities)! Compare this to Basic Stamps ($30 to $100), Arduinos ($25 to $50), and all the other hobby microprocessors out there, and it's a "no brainer" to see the cost savings! As a matter of fact, Basic Stamps actually use a PIC chip as their brain!!! Why pay $25 to $100 more per chip for a few cents worth of extra parts (voltage regulator, crystal oscillator, etc)??? It's insane! :/
In March of 2009 I created my YouTube page, so that I could document my electronics projects on video. So far I have uploaded 18 videos, and I have many more projects that I need to go back, record, and upload! ...I probably get 2 or 3 e-mails per week from nerds around the world asking me how to do this and that with electronics, and I answer them all.
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| LCD display controlled by a PIC16F684 microprocessor |
NOTE: I'm going to go back tomorrow and upload some pictures to go along with all this text.
It's past my bedtime. I'll continue this tomorrow...
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