Andrey Mikhalchuk’s Blog

Many people are dreaming about consolidating all media files (video, music, pictures etc) in a single place. For some it is a huge full of DVDs, CDs and photos. Others buy hardware media servers and store all files in them. I chose a solution based on Archos 605 WiFi and a Linux Server running UPnP Media Server. Here’s how it works …

Couple days ago I became happy owner of Archos 605. Here is a short review of this wonderful/horrible device and explanation why most people won’t like it.

Last 12 months I was working on an interesting device that provides the network security features many companies and families are dreaming about. You probably already have heard about different threats out there like internet predators, viruses, spyware, dangerous websites, confidential information leaking from your business and others. Also you probably tried to find answers to questions like

• Is my office network used appropriately? Do people really use it for work and not something else?
• Are my kids safe in the Internet? Are their virtual friends really friends?
• Why is my internet so slow?
• Who in my network is using the internet most, when and what for?
• How can I prevent my children or employees from browsing inappropriate content, wasting time in chats or games?

Finally, you might want to get answers to the questions immediately and you don’t want to spend a lot of time configuring every single computer in your network, installing software and other techi stuff … So the answer to all those questions is one small box called MineStream Defender and here is what it can do …

Here is a typical wireless video camera you can find on ebay and also available from many other e-stores. What do you think about it? Pretty cool - for just $30-50 you can buy ability to see all uninvited intruders crawling towards your house in the night darkness. However before you keep dreaming take a look inside this piece of electronics …

A year+ ago I’ve got my Motorola RAZR V3T (free with 2-year subscription from T-Mobile). Almost immediately I ordered 1Gb card that would fit more information and music. Of course I chose the cheapest one. At the moment the best offer was 1Gb Kingston card. Unfortunately when I inserted the card into the cellphone it did not get recognized by the phone. It appeared that only “compatible” MiniSD cards could be used with the cellphone, but that “compatibility” cost twice more. So here is how to make your “incompatible” card work with that cellphone.

Unfortunately most servos you can get for a reasonable price are not the same. Each servo has its own parameters and the cheapest ones for not allow adjustments. Fortunately in the “routerbot OS” your can easily fix that problem. Here is how you can do that in the “routerbot” project.

The routerbot we almost have built as descibed in the routerbot project is self-sufficient, but you can get more fun with it if you put an inexpensive wireless camera on top of it. This post describes how you can do that.

Ufff… the most critical part of your robot project is done. Now it is time to do basic tests and assemble whatever you have done. Here’s is hwo you do that…

Linksys WRT54GL original operating system was not designed to control external devices, so we need to rewrite it with something more suitable. This post explaines how to do this and provides the new firmware. You may also want to refer to the overall project outline.

WRT54GL router is not capable of controlling mechanical parts as is. So we need to add a communication port to it. This post describes how to do that. The complete outline of the routerbot project can be found in this post.

Linksys WRT54G router and similar are very famous because of great modifications potential hidden in the device. For some purposes you may want to add a serial port to the router. You may need that for development purposes or to turn the router into a robot for instance. This post describes the procedure of taking the router apart so you can get access to the serial port connector hidden inside.

For our robot we will need the following parts and tools:

Somehow my kids became huge fans of different kinds of robots, starting from teleoperated planet explorers and ending with transformers. So I promised them to build a robot, and in a few days I ended up with this result which I’m pretty proud to share. It appeared that for $150 or less you can build pretty cool robot that is way easier to program then most robots out there on the market + its range is way larger then most toys have. Here’s how you can build your own inexpensive yet powerful robot…