Thursday, February 18, 2010

Well, the DC power supply works, but is a bit faulty. I guess a duty cycle of 10 ms isn't fast enough to avoid small fluctuations in the multimeter reading. Also, when the the duty cycle is set to full bore it still doesn't get more than 5.5V out despite having 7.2V in the batteries. But whatever, I've got a 10 step (did I mention they weren't equal steps) DC power supply which is more options than I have with swapping battery packs.

The big success is finally getting Lego Digital Design to work properly. It took me a while, and I had to learn some techniques for getting around odd quirks of the program, but I was able to build my oscillator out of it. This is pretty handy since I am going to have to take those oscillators apart soon to continue on the PID controlled balance bot.

The most amazing thing about LDD is the instructions mode. Click on the button and it goes through and creates an .html file that will allow you to recreate your device. I'm sure this is not big news to Jeremy, but I find it awesome that they create a new build pattern based on what you have actually built in the model. It is pretty sweet.

Speaking of sweet . . . and sour. With the new release of Mass Effect 2 it seemed like a good time to go back and play Mass Effect (1) for the first time. I'm not in very far, but I am most impressed with the cinematic quality of the dialogue and camera work. I haven't gotten too in depth with the action parts of the game, but it has been really fun working through the dialogue trees. The way the system works is that you select where you want to try to push the conversation, and rather than everything changing immediately the selection you made just works its way into conversation. Meanwhile I'm also working my way through a second run-through of Fallout 3. This time I am evil melee fighter and am trying to pick up some of the last eight achievements left in the game. It has been pretty fun so far, but I'm having a very hard time going around being a dick all of the time. We'll see if this gets better.

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