GTA Vice City vehicle screenshots

[2004-09-07] I've started a screenshot page where you can see screenshots of the vechicles in GTA Vice City. I play this a lot right now, and need to learn the names and looks.

Minolta X20

[2004-01-10] I've bought a Minolta DiMAGE X20 digital camera. Read more on the Minolta X20 page.

My Movies list

[2003-11-28] In IMDB you can as a registered user add movies to a list of your own. I've started this and you can see the list of movies I've seen so far.

SSC-II software

[2003-05-11] The Perl/curses software "Limisc" is released. It's used to control a Mini SSC-II device, that controls servo motors via a normal RS-232 serial port. Go to the robot arm page.

Pages moved to five

[2003-04-23] My pages has now been moved to my personal server named five. It's running Apache, which is lighter on the machine than Roxen. Not that I don't like and don't use Roxen otherwise, but for my own needs it's a bit overkill. More information about five.

The almighty robot arm

Limisc, Perl Mini SSC-II software
(tar.gz package, 5,5 kB)
GTK servo controller software
(tar.gz package, 1,2 MB)
Servo controller manual
(PDF, 178 kB)
Video clip of my robot arm in action (MPG, 3MB)
Lynxmotion, the manufacturer
Mini SSC-II links

The robot arm is manufactured and sold by Lynxmotion. It's no longer sold as you see it in the video, this one was bought in the end of 2002 and Lynxmotion tries to optimize the arm all the time.

So, what can it do? Well, not much. No heavy work at all, it's so small. But for small work, it's great. There are six servo motors in the arm, together with a servo motor controller (Mini SSC-II) which can be controlled via a standard RS-232 interface. The servo controller understands simple byte-digit-commands, as <255,3,128>, which means "controlcode","servo 3","take position 128 (out of 0-254)".

The latest software I've written for the Mini SSC-II is "Limisc", written in Perl. It uses and needs the "Curses" and "Widget" modules. It's not yet finished, but it's useable for experimenting, either interactively with the curses interface - or automated for just running a program file. More information here.

I've begun writing a GTK+ application in C, for controlling the servo controller. It's not ready at all, but you might find it useful for getting ideas and controlling the robot arm for simple tasks. Development is stalled.

Updated Saturday, 15-Sep-2007 00:46:48 CEST