George Frick

There has been next to no progress on my robot; this has been due to buying a house and realizing I would need to do a lot of work on it. That aside; I now have a work bench coming together and the time and money freeing up to get back to it (yay!). There is some news; there is now a local Maker Space getting started up. This may provide tools, resources and people to work with. I am very excited since I live nearby (about a mile away); though there is no way I could currently afford the membership fee. We will see; as I plan to stop by one of their open houses. More exciting; I have purchased a part. I saw the part come up on my reader feed and realized it was cheap and would go quickly. I refer to the 1.8 inch 18 bit color TFT LCD display with microSD card breakout released by adafruit. At only $25.00 I knew they would be gone in an instant so I just went ahead and purchased one! My goal for this is to use it for output from the robot; debugging output in the short term and more...

Well, working with Netbeans I have a problem occur over and over. One of those annoying programming tasks where you always make the change but are too lazy to deal with underlying problem. Today I decided to address on of them. Every time I create a class in Netbeans, there is a comment that appears at the top: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ My co-workers leave this in place; I am OCD about removing it every time. I don't like four lines of useless code at the top. This morning I decided to change this problem and maybe make my Java class templates a little better. I will walk through improving the class template, and adding the license file for display. This is a stub class created before the changes: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ package com.something.somewhere; /**  *  * @author GFrick  */ public...

I was browser my Google reader feed and a great site popped up. I've checked it out and once I get my work bench set up and get back to my robot; I'll definitely be ordering some things from here. I wanted to spread the word about the site: http://www.inmojo.com/ They have lots of RFID, Robotics and just Arduino stuff that I think would be cool to play with. I hope to get a full post up soon.