Side projects

I’m on my second read through of the APress Android programming book I’ve got in my library. First pass gets me general familiarity and the lay of the land. Second pass is when I start trying to use things. The Android dev tools and latest JDK are now installed and working on both my laptop and my main desktop at home. Next step is to get a ‘hello world’ type program in place and running. Once that is done I will likely try putting in place a simple RESTful web service front end in PHP on my hosting and see if I can make a simple multiplayer board game work. Lots to learn and lots to play with here. Knock the rust off my Java and get some useful practical knowledge of Android.

I’m seriously thinking of getting my RepRap project moving forward again. I bought the electronics and read through the wiki a couple of years ago. I was hoping to get my teen age daughter interested in working on it with me. She decided it wasn’t that cool and work got busy and the parts I had got shelved. At this point I am likely to have some free time, I know what I need next and money shouldn’t be a serious issue. My next step needs to be the stepper motors and some connectors, wiring and heat sinks (the stepper controller chips I have look pretty good, but I’m uncomfortable running them without some way to pull heat out). There seem to be sources for relatively cheap steppers associated with the RepRap folks. Digikey should be able to supply the other stuff (and I have a few additional bits I need from them anyway). If things don’t get busy again in the near future, I’ll probably start moving this forward.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.