In the process of re-arranging my lab I ended up trying a few LCD apps such as LCDC and LCD-Smartie. They all suck tbh. LCDC is Matrix Orbital prop. which forces you to shell out ‘big bucks’ which is lame, and LCD-Smartie well…just sucks. I plan on writing a tiny Python app to gank MBM info and pass through RS232 to the LCD, and I’ve found the SerLCD firmware by Sparkfun to be a little unstable at times, so I’ll be fixing that later on.

I was taking a look at my P4 and decided to bump up the OCs a bit. Yes, I know the temps are ‘mad’ high, but I’m just sick of having it at sub-3GHz….it’s PAINFULLY slow, hence the OC. It takes over 45s to compute pi to 1M decimal places, and I was able to get Prime95 and OCCT to run happy with Vcore@1.6v, Vdimm@2.8v and 230fsb. 231 and XP *seems* happy but Prime95/OCCT complain…

I found this online when googling about as the abstract for a patent:

A flux generator base unit electromagnetically coupled with a receiving unit to transfer energy into the receiving unit. The base unit includes one or more permanent magnets that produce a magnetic flux, which passes through a receiver coil in the receiving unit. The receiver coil is either disposed in a separate housing that is electrically connected with a portable device, or integrated into the housing of the portable device. Either the permanent magnets or a flux shunt is moved in the base unit to produce the varying magnetic flux that is coupled to the receiver coil. As a result of the varying magnetic field experienced by the receiver coil, an electric current is induced in the receiver coil, which is conditioned (e.g., rectified, filtered, and regulated) by a conditioning circuit to charge a battery or energize electronics contained in the portable device. Various embodiments of both the base unit and receiving unit are disclosed, including “universal” base units suitable for operation with different size receiving units.

In my third year one of my collegues did something similar with two coils, where his final year project involved setting up wireless speakers. He used the close contact of the coils as a means of ‘powering’ the speakers (iirc).

I don’t see this being a huge issue. Apart from having a good ‘core’ in each coil, the robot end would have a simple AC rectifying circuit (FWBR really) and a smoothing cap. This can then be fed into a vreg thereby regulating it down to a fixed voltage. This could then be passed over to the on-board charging circuit which is connected to the on-board sealed lead acid batteries there by charging the robot and if needed when the voltage induced in the secondary coils goes over a ‘threshold’, it can in turn trigger stuff via relay action.

Since I plan on implementing GPRS, the robot shouldn’t have much trouble in locating its re-charging station…