Month: December 2017

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Baja is life, Baja is love

Once an experienced car reviewer and the owner of an well-established web magazine specializing on daily drivers warned me against comparing any car to my personal set of wheels.

I totally agree on his point that this – such attitude would be inappropriate for a journalist, but I am not a journalist and here we’re not talking about any comparison.

What we have here is a car that is both worth to drive and discuss, as this is a USDM Subaru Baja, a Subaru, a Pickup and a solid all-rounder for whatever job I’ve ever forced it into.

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Raspberry Pi as a 3D printing server

Every 3D printer owner, after the initial fascination is gone, starts toying with the idea of setting up a dedicated device for the purposes of remote control of printing.

Besides, keeping the only computer at home busy with the printjob that would take hours to complete is a generally annoying practice – not to mention the fact that you do not want to ruin the print with the forced Windows update.

And the problem gets even worse when you have dual printer setup and want to have this rig monitored, automated and optimized. This is when you get your prototyping boards out and start examining the best practices offered by open source hardware enthusiasts.

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RPi Robosapien V2

A robot that once was once topping the lineup of the WowWee robots (until the Robosapien RS Media arrived on scene), this large and neatly designed robot could be still used as a base for robotic projects – especially given the fact that design quality and the functionality of the Robosapien V2 surpasses the needs of an average robotic enthusiast.

Unfortunately, the manufacturing process of Robosapien V2 involved using the crappiest wiring ever found on Earth, so all the secondhand RS V2’s sold currently need a lot of soldering to be done before you get the robot restored to an original functionality of an advanced toy.

This is exactly most people give up and go with a full revamping of the internals.

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RPi RS Media hack

Since my times at the high school I was fascinated by the WowWee toys as their dedication to creating extremely well-designed robotic toys was matched only by the swiftness of dropping the support for this toys, making them almost useless.

The indisputable gem of their lineup was the WowWee robotics Robosapien RS Media – a 55 cm tall walking robot with embedded Linux, not to mention other features inherited from its predecessor, the Robosapien V2.

Even nowadays, with no support and a hard to find software, I feel no regrets using this magnificent piece of machinery as a mobile robot, rigged with a RPi Zero co-pilot unit and converted to LiPo batteries for ease of Maintenance.

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Apple Macintosh Classic

At some point in time I’ve been presented with the leftovers of the 1990-manufactured Macintosh Classic.

Even if it was not vandalized by some teenagers shortly prior to me getting my hands on this piece of IT heritage, a Motorola CPU was already a bit outdated by 2010s, so I had no hard feelings about gutting out the rest of the internals to save the outer shell for the later DIY project.

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