I love watching robot competitions. It doesn’t matter if it is sumo robots, line followers, boxing bipeds or the more familiar Robot Wars / BattleBot combat tournaments. I still remember being blown away by the robots in the first episodes of BBC Robot Wars when it aired back in the late nineties. It’s incredibly fun to watch these proxy battles of the minds, but I imagine that it would be even more fun to participate, especially in the heavyweight classes.

I have been making nixie clocks for some time now. I still have hundreds of various nixie tubes and dekatrons in my inventory, but I feel like taking a timeout from the clock projects for a while now and maybe focus on something else. I have tons of project ideas written down in my TODO list. Unfortunately, I don’t have an infinite amount of available time for these projects, so I will have to prioritize a bit.

A friend and colleague of mine handed me a LilyGo T5 a couple of months back (We sometimes trade electronics “overstock” resulting from getting over-excited during late night shopping sprees on AliExpress). I stuffed the T5 into my bag and mostly forgot about it until a few days ago. The device is marketed as a digital price tag, but since it has a capable onboard microcontroller (ESP32), SD card support, an E ink display along with WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, you can use it for so much more.

“The Automaton” is my take on how to do a low budget robot controller. Tech specs 6 - 45V input voltage range. Support for up to 32 servos with a maximum total current draw of 6A at 5V. 24Hz to 1526Hz PWM controller with 12 bit resolution. 240MHz MCU with WiFi and Bluetooth. 9DOF sensor fusion IMU that outputs absolute orientation angle at 100Hz. FTDI programming header. Expansion header with 14 available GPIO pins.

During a family trip to Japan last easter, I was fortunate enough to have a couple of hours to myself in the tech mecca of Tokyo, namely the Akihabara district. My two hour “geek pilgrimage” involved plans for visiting four of the more iconic shops in Akihabara. These were Mak Japan, G-Front, Tsukomo Robot Kingdom and Vstone Robot Center. After having spent quite some time looking at maps and web sites, I was finally able to locate the entrance of the MAK Japan shop.