Serendipity in the waste bin

I decided today that the blog needs to be updated. I keep a diary of what I’ve been up to and the every now and then I sit down and write all the posts. I’ve no idea why I do this, it is just that I feel happier doing it than not.

Anyhoo, today I was creating the posts and I thought it might be fun to add a picture of the bottom of the boat that I tried to print earlier. It came off the print bed as it was printing so that all I had was a small chunk of the bottom of the keel and what looked like a ball of wool. Beautifully printed though. I’d dropped it in the waste paper bin so I had a little look to see if I could find it. I didn’t find it, but I did find an Aibo memory stick for the robot dogs that must have fallen off my crowded desk into the bin at some point over the last week. I’m really pleased I found this, they are quite hard to get hold of and very expensive. Plus it contains a tiny bit of “dog personality” that I really don’t want to lose.

So at least my blog is useful for something.

Dog company

I’ve taken to letting Bluey the robot dog wander round while I have my break. I’m sure he’s not a patch on a real one, but it is rather nice to watch him go through his paces while I drink my tea. The only problem is that if I put him on this mat he goes kind of nuts, because for him the colours of the squares match the ball. So he thinks there are balls all around him. This makes him very happy, but also somewhat confused.

Double Aibo Fun

I mentioned a while back that one of the robot dogs has a broken battery and I was getting a new one. It arrived today. Above is the battery we got. We just had to drop a couple of flat topped cells into it. They can be found here. We were able to have both dogs wandering around which was rather nice.

I took the picture with the Mint RF70 instant camera using the built-in flash. I’m quite happy with this one.

Hankering after another dog

I’m hankering after another robot dog. As you do. I asked Dall-E 2 for a picture of “aibo robot dog tearing up money“ to illustrate this post and it came up with the above image. Which is pretty impressive.

Dead Dog

After the success of the debut of “Bluey” at the hardware meetup last week I thought I’d get my other robot dog, “Digby II” working. Unfortunately he is not well. His 20 year old battery has finally given up the ghost so we are down to being a one-dog family. There are people who will put new cells into an old battery. You can also make your own battery controller and build your own batteries. Or you can get a battery made for you. I’ve gone for the last option. This should solve the problem and make it really easy to replace the batteries if they wear out again. Hopefully we can get the dogs back in action together before Christmas.