A decent week, if unnecessarily loaded down with homework... Also, it has become apparent that my neighbors expect life to stop for football games.

Motor Drivers:
I have become irritated with the motor driver offerings to the hobby community (and the educational community for that matter). Your choices? Realistically Pololu and IFI. This is unacceptable.

In response I have started designing motor drivers. Everything from the 10A range to 100-300A. Parts are on the way, samples have been shipped, and donations have been collected from friends. I hope to have at least one finished before the Spring semester. Units will be sold at a minimal markup; software and schematics will be made open source.


Underwater ROV:

• Poured float from urethane foam to allow for near-neutral buoyancy and minimum compression at depth.
• Finished modifications to propeller hubs and mounted fourth motor.

Linear Accelerator:

• New coil tested. 3.5" long coil, 3 layers, 14awg tried as 1st stage. Resulting velocities were significantly less than the previous coil(4 layers, approx 2.5" long 14awg) which had achieved 6.5J Kinetic Energy at over 20m/s.
• I must finish construction of a "V-switch" using 2 SCR banks. Held up by tight budget and lack of high current IGBT drive optoisolators.
• Got the idea of expanding the V switch out to multiple legs and using either a longer coil or additional coils on the same stage(if that makes sense).

Centaur:
A late night wiring "correction" bypassed a voltage regulator, putting ~10VDC unregulated to the 5VDC "regulated" power bus. Casualties included two MaxSonar's. As a result, I will include a zener diode + fuse with any power bus containing valuable electronics on future projects. It was fortunate my GPS was not wired during the incident and the more than a dozen Dynamixel servos are rated to over 12VDC.

I made progress on a few other projects not deserving of their own section(at this time). My Matlab simulation of obstacle avoidance using RL is working with only 4 bit numbers. Prepare for a RL robot running no code. "Hard-wired for learning?" you ask... that's right. Also, I re-attached my other walker's(cricket?) head because it looked very depressing laying on the ground, connected only by its "spinal cord".