Well its official, about 2 months ago I finally decided to go it alone and put all of my efforts into freelancing. This has thankfully co-insided with quite a few job offers in the events industry and a few in the electronics world. Whilst I feel comfortable in the events world, it is often not very cerebral and can be physically taxing. So it was a welcome surprise when a small electronics job fell right on my lap, winner! It is a little frustrating that I am not allowed to publicly talk about it, quite an odd situation really. In short, it was a some electronics in a box with a bit of embedded development and some power electronics. Quite pleasant really.
Student Robotics:
The second annual Student robotic competition was held a few weekends back. We’ve been developing the hardware for this for nearly three years so it was pleasing to see that it is generally coming together. On the whole there were far fewer occurrences of hardware failing due to user misconfiguration (Previous failures were mainly due to powerful things getting plugged into/wiped over weedy signal related stuff.) The drive for next years hardware development is already in earnest. We are attempting to migrate to the Beagleboard from the slug and have re-spec’ed the power board to support this and remove some of the legacy cruft.
Student robotics brings me neatly onto some “software”(a pile of scripts) that I have been “developing” (banged together as I went along with little regard for a plan). We are migrating student robotics to gEDA. In the past I have complained allot about the usability of these tools for PCB design, but I am now searching for an epiphany. To help the miracle along, I wrote some scripts to make symbol libraries for commonly shaped parts. See gedashield.
Update:
Last night apparently student robotics won “About 1kg of engraved glass” at the Southampton EVA’s – apparently some sort of awards ceremony.
