Walter Update 3.14.P

Ah, the chaos of life...

A lot has happened in the the last couple months. This is neither the time nor the place to rant about personal issues or work or money or life or time but I can say that all of these things have been getting in my way in one form or another on a pretty non-stop basis. This is not to say that I have not been able to chissel out small chunks of time late at night and when I am not out either hammering nails or selling the next job to get some work done on Walter.

I am in the process of yet another strip-down/ rebuild of Walter, this time for a major brain transplant. Previously, Walter was run off of a total of (6) picaxe chips. Now, I am down to just one Propeller chip. I have gone from 2 LCD 2x16 displays to one TV. I have upgraded to quad-encoders from my old reflective single ones. To cut to the chase, I have basically reduced the total amount of hardware on Walter by more than 50%. Hell, just look at the "on" switches... I went from 7 to 4.

I am loving the Propeller for its speed and power, but the more code I write, the more I like the fact that in Spin, everything seems to end up in neat little modular "chunks" and these chunks can be arranged in well, very modular ways. It is almost like having stand-alone pieces of code written on building blocks and those blocks can be stacked or arranged any way you want. It really is a well though-out system. I should add that there continues to be a fair learning curve but I keep getting more out of it than I have been putting in.

I have been documenting my progress in a super-secret blog, wanting to get some progress under my belt before going public. I think I am at that point now.

http://www.rocketbrandstudios.com/

I will continue to post there with all of the small steps and detailed stuff, and also post here with all the major accomplishments. For now, I will just post some pictures of the changes to the main deck and the "explaining" video. There have been so many tiny victories that, if I were to post them all here, I would literally flood the main time line...

Enjoy.