Lee Johnson (Eljin)
And this is Giskard: 
I'm an electronics technician with a radio communications company located in Newport News, VA. I started in computers with an Atari 400 and was watching my dad build Heathkit Amateur Radios when I was still a little kid. I learned to solder when I was 8 and troubleshooting followed soon after.
I'm hoping to spark some interest in the local area in robotics after I can start showing off my robot Giskard.
Anyone who gets the reference to Giskard, please feel free to email me as I feel like the only person in Virginia who likes hard core science fiction, much less robotics.
Giskard is currently built on a plywood base and will be driven around by the motors from a couple of those Little Tykes Ride on toys.
I have an old UPS that has been modified to run from 4 gel cell batteries and will be driving a 12Vdc power supply, the pc power supply and the motors. So far I have the motor controller, the I2c interface and a few other assorted pieces built on project boards and waiting to be programmed and mounted to the main chassis.
The main board is a Pentium 233 from my previous desktop machine running Slackware Linux 10, which is my current OS of choice.
Oh and if you've figured out that I'm a cheap scrounge? 
YOU ARE RIGHT! So far, I've managed to only spend about $40 actual in the construction of this and most of that was in the rear caster and the project boards. Thank God for samples...
Email: [[ljohnson@accessnet.com]]
After much abuse, some fried components, a lot of rework and redesign, a couple of unfortunate tiffs with my wife, another $20, and a good round of fighting with the beast... I have the motors running!
I ended up getting the I2C master directly from the motherboard, an unexpected windfall. This was after hooking up battery ground and the floating ground of my UPS (main power supply) and finding a 14volt difference on just the GND. ZAPP!!!!! That managed to take out the MCU for the motor controller, it's associated crystal, my PIC programmer, the parallel I2C interface that I had just built, the parallel port on my mainboard and finally both of my LMD18200s. Please kids don't try this at home...
I have learned MANY valuable lessons from this. Namely not to assume much of anything. I have gained a wealth of knowledge that I will now apply towards fleshing out the rest of my robot.
I am hoping to be able to give a step by step example of how and how not to build one for themselves. I really want to help the people who like me don't have anyone else around who can help explain the problems they might be running into.
3Jan2006
I now have some pictures of my robot to share. I haven't done a lot of work lately due to the death of my son back in August. I am slowly starting to get back to it. I have managed to make a few additions in the intervening time period, but as expected, my work is moving slowly.
This is an early frontal view. I hadn't gotten the third level up yet.
An overhead view of the mainboard level with the motor controller on the left. Note the standard PC power supply as I am using an old UPS and standard AC power supplies to provide my DC to the electronics. It also gives me a ready made charger for the 4 (so far) 12 volt gel-cells I'm carrying on board.
Here is another view of the front of the robot showing the motors and controller electronics. These are the motors I have gleaned from the Little Tykes ride on toys.
As you can see I went ahead and hand wired my motor controller and the drivers for the motors. Note the white stripes on the wheel. (Picture on the right.) I painted these on for the encoders to read, also hand built. These are also my latest project and are so far unfinished.
This picture shows the 802.11b USB network device and a few of the other connections to the mainboard. At the moment it allows me to use SSH and control the Robots functions directly. I'm going to build an external interface using the Player software to allow me to control the robot from a joystick. I also have the sound functions working, utilizing Festival and soon Sphinx3 to allow me to give it voice commands. I have gotten an ALICE system up and running on board, so that when you (currently) type input into the robot it will respond using it's own voice. This is looking very promising as it will allow the robot to exhibit an active personality. I'm still choosing between the OpenCYC project and OpenMind to provide it with a knowledge base for more intelligent conversation. The ALICE XML files already have a broad variety of preprogrammed responses, but these are still currently limited in scope. The XML does allow me to embed commands and execute them when asked. For those interested, I chose the Python version of Program N on the ALICE website. It integrates well with the Python component of Player.
That's it for right now. I have to finish migrating over to my new laptop and then I can get back to Giskard.
Later Eljin
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