Street Tech

Our buds over at Solarbotics have finally put together special parts bundles for two of the three projects in my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots book. The kit for the Coathanger Walker costs US$27.70 and the kit for Mousey the Junkbot goes for $19.60. These bundles do not include everything, so check your parts lists carefully. For instance, the Walker kit does not include the 40-tooth plastic gear and the Mousey kit doesn’t include a mouse. There are some bonuses though, such as a set of Solarbotics’s photodiode optical sensors for Mousey, which are likely more sensitive than the IR receivers that you’d pull from a mouse, as suggested in the book. The bundles also include a spool of Hydro-X solder, a fave among BEAM builders, including the Big God hisself, Mark Tilden.

These bundles couldn’t have come out at a better time, as a version of the Mousey project is going to be published in the second issue of Make magazine.

Lifehacker has a nice little link-list of hacks related to iPod, cellphone, and laptop batteries. We’d like to add a few hacks for AA and AAA-size batteries used in low-power devices such as remote controls:

Roll Your Own – If the batteries in your infrared (IR) remote control appear to have died, before replacing them, open the battery door and roll the batteries in place. Try the remote again and you may be surprised by the results. I just finally tossed away the batts in my TV remote after rolling them every week or so (whenever it stopped talking to my TV) for the past six months (or more!).

Save Half-Used Batts – Devices that draw a lot of power, such as anything with a DC motor, will require new batteries before the existing batteries are actually spent, in other words, they’ll still have enough juice in ’em for devices with lower power needs, such as IR remotes. If you have a multimeter, you can even find out how much juice is left, write it on a Post-It, and store it in a Ziplock along with the batteries (that’s what I do).

Reverse Polarity, Mr. Sulu! – If your remote control starts acting strange, or stops working altogether, and new batteries don’t fix the problem, before you throw it away, try putting in fresh batts, but put them in opposite to the correct polarity marked on the remote — leave them this way for about a minute. Then, put the batteries back as normal. This effectively acts as a reset which will (allegedly) work on some remotes.

Got any other battery tips? Add ’em to the comments.