Bazza In AFRICA

Let's Talk Geek Episode 2

2010-04-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

Finally the second show of "Let's Talk Geek"

In this show:

Stewart Allen
Tim Haak
Jeff Hinds
Barry Reid

Covering:

Where people can find us
Why finally having uncapped is so cool
Stew gets featured on Hack a Day
IPTV
Wireless power
Australopithecus Sediba
New recording equipment
Pick of the week

Direct Download

Let's Talk Geek

2010-04-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

Just some photos from our first podcast recording.

Theo, Barry, Tim, Stew and Jeff

Barry, Tim and Ste

Moving In

2009-12-09T08:25:00.000-08:00

Two new guys have moved into Awesome Pad, Kobus and Niel. Great to have you guys here.

Waiting for new beds to arrive, so on the floor for you...

Kobus

Getting desk set up.

2009-12-08T15:25:00.001-08:00

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Moving Out

2009-12-07T01:11:00.000-08:00

Marius and Mandy moved out about a week or so ago. Marks Awesome Pad's 1 year anniversary.

Moving the Beds...

2009-12-03T02:59:00.000-08:00

Myself and Francois started restoring this old coffee table. Was painted with a thick horrible blue paint. So we set at it with paint stripper and a new electric sander we bought. Check out the photos bellow.

Can it be.. The pool is clear..

2009-11-15T12:18:00.001-08:00

Well the pool is finally clear (only took us like 3 weeks) and ready for summer. Next up Pool Party.

Check out our grapes!

2009-11-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

Well this is the second round of grapes we are going to be getting from the vine since we have moved into our house. The first batch came just after we moved in, so we did not get much time to cover them all up before the birds got to them. This year the birds are not going to be so lucky.

Rooms Taken

2009-11-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

Hey all..

All the rooms in Awesome Pad have been taken... Sorry to all the people that lost out, I know you were all holding thumbs..

Awesome Pad

2009-08-21T06:47:00.003-07:00

We have 2 rooms opening up in our house (Awesome Pad) call me if anyone wants to audition :)

Pics of blink (robot build blog)

2009-06-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

Building the frame.

Parts we got from 2 cheap cordless drills

Old laptop for higher control

Some components we used
Frame more complete
Attaching motors
Getting the electronics right

New wheels for blink

blink taking shape

Components moved to perf board
Taking more shape
After the fire...

Its been a while...

2009-06-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

Ok.. Im back..

Well its been a while since I last posted and loads has happened since then. Almost 6 months worth of catching up to do, so you know what? Im not going to. Insted im going to tell you whats going on in my life at this moment in time.

Dating this girl Nicol at the moment, very different to other girls I have dated in the past, so will see where it takes us. oh and its the first blond girl I have dated.

We have now been living in our new house for about 6 months and let me tell you, It just gets more and more AWESOME, thus it has been dubed "Awesome Pad"

Work is chilled at the moment as we have pushed back a big role out of our new software, but will get back to being busy soon.

Will be working on hectic GPS stuff soon for fleet managment, sshhhh thats all I can tell you for now, as its top secret :)

And now to get to what you have ALL been waiting for..... Our new Project...
You all remember the BazCam, the camera I had setup in my house that you could control.... WELL.. Wecome to our new BazCam on steroids, we call him "blink"

blink is a robot that we are building with a built in camera, that YOU can control and drive around our house, all done over the internet, and the great news is that he is almost done. We wanted to have him finnished by today but we have had a few setbacks, things like that happen when 1 day you wake up and say "lets build a robot that drives around the house that people can control over the internet"

A few of the setbacks have been things like one of the motors being damaged and our main controler board catching on fire... but im sure we will have him up and running by friday. Maybe not for public control as yet but at least for some sort of viewing.

So thats whats been keeping me busy for the past few weeks... keep checking here for some pictures and keep a lookout for the launch of blink's website http://blink.awesomepad.co.za

Just An Idea

2008-12-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

Just thought I would add a pic of our pre House Warming.... GooD TimeS....

Don't Forget to be there on monday the 15th Dec... Call me for Directions...

Lerika's 21st Birthday

2008-12-03T01:26:00.000-08:00

Well it all started early Saturday morning on the 1st Now (Yes it was a while ago). I got this call from her saying... "can you please come help me with some stuff"
"Some Stuff" turned out to be us running around to sort so much out that we were late for her own Birthday. Was nice to meet all the people I had heard so much about.

The next day Lerika and I just chilled at her parents place, and did birthday things....

Birthday Girl

Looking Good :)

Me

Lerika & Her Brother

Speech Time, Lerika & Dad

Slide Show

Before Bedtime

Breakfast Next Morning

I thought it would be a good idea to throw the Birthday Girl in the pool on the morning of her real birthday...

Relaxing in the afternoon..

Bath Time... We found this bath in the middle of a field on our Bike ride.

Bike Ride

New DW Wireless Tower

2008-11-17T08:15:00.000-08:00

We built a new tower to replace the old FG tower... here are a few pics of our hard work....

Curri Cup Final... Sharks WON!!!

2008-11-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

We all went to Richies place for a poitjie and rugby... Game ended up with all the sharks fans very happy....

Richie... Making our food

Mariska, Stew, Christof, Me

Jacques
Me, Mandy

Stew trying and succeeding to pull off a Taliban look

Some Random Night

2008-11-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

I cant remember when this was....

The Black tie dinner i went to...

2008-09-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

Was a cool night.... My date is on the right in white.... Will upload more as soon as i get them.

Rolandas Birthday...

2008-09-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

We all started at a chinees restaurant, after that to the pub downstairs we went... and the night would not be complete without spending the rest at Billy's

Some random night

2008-09-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Who knows..... Some where out in Pretoria west... never to be seen again...

Barman... Very random.

Oppi Koppi

2008-09-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

Oppi Koppi was great... But lucky its only once a year. Saturday was by far the best night, we saw Zebra and Giraffe play their first live Gig.

Paul getting ready for a big night!

BaZZa

Some Random guy we met!

Monkey!

Monkey after a long long awesome night!

Main Stage

Mandys Real Birthday....

2008-08-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

Well we had a poker night for Mandy's birthday. Something different for a change so it was nice.
Brett and Jacques cleaned up in the end. After that we headed to Billy the Bums...

Mandy

Poker

Sam, BaZZa

Jacques, Brett

Lynnwood Wireless High Site Upgrade

2008-08-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

We upgraded the lynwood high site 2 weekends ago. We added a dedicated grid antenna for the line of links to JHB to get a better through put speed. All in all it works very well...

Weekend Away

2008-07-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well all back from my weekend away... was so so much fun. Met a bunch of new people so that was great as well.

We got there a bit later than we thought, as Mildred (the GPS lady voice) thought it would be a good idea to take us right through the center of pretoria city. But in the end we got there safe and sound.

Everyone was chilled on Friday and we just braaied and talked rubbish around the fire, still ended up only hitting the hay at about 5am.

Sam (one of the girls staying in the same chelate as me) thought it would be a good idea to get up at 8am and start slamming doors, Me (still feeling the affects of half a case of beer) did not think this was such a good idea.

But now I was up, and thought about us being here to celebrate Mandy's 21st, it would be rude not to. So Stew threw me a beer...

I then had a nasty fight with a wheel barrow (thats all i am saying)

We all headed out to the local pub to go watch the rugby (not one of SA's best games) and then went to the reptile park where some stupid guy is sitting in a cage with 40 deadly snaked www.madmartin.co.za Stews Girl friend (Mariska) decided that she wanted to go inside the cage and get a closer look.....

Then we were back to the party.....

It was fun and Games and Games and Games when we got back... cricket, indian war signs... Fun was had all round...

The food was also amazing.. we had a big spit and tons and tons of other stuff...

We partied till 6:30 and then knew it was time to get to bed...

Thanx again Mandy for such a great weekend...

Mariska, Francois, Stew, Carmen

Mariska

BaZZa (ME)

Mariska, Stew

Brett

Mandy, Me

Christelle

Sam, Liesl, ....

Sam, Me
Mariska, Stew

Francois

Me, Francois

Mandy, Rolanda

Jacques

BaZZa

Mandy

Good Times, Out With Friends

2008-07-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

Have not posted much lately but here with a few pics of a few nights out while i have been MIA...

Im really looking forward to this weekend, its Mandy's 21st and we are all going away for the weekend... should be very good fun... will post pics when im back....

Mandy and Liesel

BaZZA Famous look

BaZZA Serious Look

Have NO!! idea who the people in this pic are...

BaZZA

Rhain, Jaques, Mandy and Liesel

They like the BUT....

Rhain

Rhain Big fall (you would know if u were there)

New Motto To Live By

2008-07-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

New Motto From my good mate Bradly Swart...

"ye, my motto that i've come up with is, if you can't see and don't think that I am worth your time and effort then please don't waste mine"

So sick of being stuffed around....

Christmas in July

2008-07-02T04:29:00.000-07:00

Hey BazzaReiders....

Me and my mates are having a Christmas in July party on the 25.... Post a comment if u have any coooool ideas...

We have been trying to find a snow machine but with no luck...

And yes it will all be on my Cam :D

More Parts Arived

2008-07-01T02:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday more parts arrived from the UK, the A/D converters (Analogue to digital). The parts seem to be coming from all over the world. Once again the parts are tiny so our work is going to be cut out for us...

Firday at the Square

2008-06-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

Just a standard night out at the square... few beers...

Bazza (ME)

Stew and James

New Live WebCam

2008-06-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

I have added a live webcam to my Blog... Check it out on the right...

FIRST PARTS ARIVE

2008-06-26T10:31:00.001-07:00

Hey Hey.... The first electronic components arrived today at stews office, all the way from Hong Kong... Take a look... next parts should be here soon...

Quadcopter.org

2008-06-24T05:44:00.000-07:00

No don't worry we have not given up on the project.... We have just been doing loads of research into all the electronic components that we will be using and placing orders for them from the US..

If you take a look on www.quadcopter.org and look at the parts list it will show you all the parts we have decided on so far and what we have ordered.

Will be adding some tech notes to the website soon as well and will post a few pics as soon as the mail man arrives with the first components.

Friday Night At My Place

2008-06-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

Had a braai at my place on Friday, was good fun. The normal crowed was mostly present.
Its getting very cold up here now days so thought it would be a good idea to dig a whole in the garden to have a bit of a wood fire to keep us warm. This went down very well with everyone, so was deff a good idea....

Just setting up Friday afternoon.

Ty also having a good time...

Mariska keeping warm..

James doing the same...

Stew...

Jacques...

Sunday... Build Day

2008-06-18T04:01:00.000-07:00

So on Sunday morning we got working on the first electronic parts of the quadcopter. The plan for the day was to get the motor control operational from the microprocessor with an input coming for a serial port.

We started off by getting the oscilloscope up and running so that we could check the signal we were generating, this came in very handy as we would soon see.

We then started off building the prototype board with the atmel mega 8 as the main control chip for generating the PWM signal.... we hit 2 problems that we never thought we would have ever done.

First time we hock the board up with everything connected, we connected the wrong power source wire's, so we were pumping 12v into the board instead of 5v... with a quick rip out of the wire's after seeing this on the multimeter we were hoping that we did not blow the ISP programmer, but we would only know this once we got it all up and running.

After changing the wire's to the power supply and making sure we had the right voltage we thought it was time to try again. so we plugged it all in again and crossed fingers, after such a stupid mistake surly we would not do something like that again... NOTHING.... Stew trys thinks we might have blowen the atmel chip with the 12v we were feeding it. He touched the chip... "aaaaaaaahhhhhhh" screams Stew, "The chip is F****ing hot" so we turn it all off again and check the wiring. Turns out we had connected the 5v power into the analogue to digital converter pin instead of the vcc pin.

We changed the wiring and checked it 100% as we did not want to make a stupid mistake again. NOTHING..... but this was not a surprise as we were almost sure by this stage we had blown the atmel, so with a quick swap out of the chip finally everything was running 100%

We weird up an LED to the board and wrote some code to make it blink. Yay it was working now we could get to work on the code to generate the PWM signal to control the Motor.

We had some problems at first with generating the signal as we were still getting our heads around the atmels data sheet. Finally we figured out the right equations to use to get the numbers for the right pulse width. we thought it would be best to get a servo moving first as this uses the same signal as the motor controller. Now with the right signal being generated it was not hard to get the servo moving and we had that done in no time.

Time to move to the motor controller... we first got this running as normal and just made the motor speed up and slow down but itself. we then programmed in a serial controller so that we could start getting so debug info out the system. this turned out to be way way easier than we thought, and in a short time we were getting info out of what our program was doing. we moved on to start making the speed of the motor controllable from the serial console, with a few tweaks of the code we got this done.

By this stage we thought we should call it a night, So we shot a video of what we had done and posted to You Tube.

3D Puzzle all done....

2008-06-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

Well here it is....

ISP Programer

2008-06-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

Well Stew was busy on Saturday so i thought that I would jump right in and build my Atmel programmer. Was really easy to do and worked first time. Soon after that i was programing my first chip with it and got it blinking an LED in no time...

Cleaned out the work bench and setup for electronic work

This is my programer... Populated with the Atmel microprocesor ready for programing.....

Friday was Puzzle day...

2008-06-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

Well after about 2 years of having this 3D puzzle that i got from Dubai, I thought it was time to build it and put it on my desk in my office...

Here a few pics of the build. Sorry there is no final pic from when i finished, but i forgot to take one :P but i will take one on Tuesday and post it up.

Build Day 2

2008-06-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

Well we bought a few right angle clamps to keep the frame square, but after attaching the first one to the frame and then checking the other side with a tri square we bought.... things were not aligning. It turns out the expensive tri square we bought is not quite square....

We then cut the the 4 strengthening bars, drilled the holes for them and attached them to the frame.

We were going to rivet the bars to the frame but thought it would be best to bolt them on as we might want to use the same bolts for the landing gear or camera mount at a later stage.

Well now with the frame pretty much done and only weighing 296g things are looking good in the weight department. We hoping for a weight of not too much more that 1kg as we would like to hover at about half throttle. We have done some testing and it seems with the 4 motors we should get about 2.4kgs of thrust.

Mock up with right angle clamps.

Mock up of strengthening bars.

Mock up with holes drilled.

Final outcome after it had all been bolted together.

Just a pic to for us to keep track of weights...

Well now that most of the frame is done, we need to start working on some of the electronics. First thing we will be doing is getting the electronic speed controlers that power the 3 phaze motors, to run off our microcontrolers (Atmel Mega8's) we will be generating a PWM signal that will tell the speed controler at what speed to run the motor at...

quadcopter.org Project

2008-06-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

Well myself and a mate stew have started work on a new project quadcopter.org

The aim is to build a 4 rotor helicopter with a autopilot system that we will write.
The Quadcopter will contain a few custom built components eg. computer controlled speed controllers, electronic compass, accelerometers, gyros, GPS, GSM module for long distance controling over the cellular network and a wifi module for the closer range controling.

It will also carry a long range camera so we can navigate or just look while the auto pilot is flying....

You can follow the build at www.quadcopter.org or here on my blog..

Here are a few pics from the first build night... we had a few planning nights befor this but this is the first "Build night"

Stew filing down edges after first frame cut.

Measurements with our new R200 steel rule for the first notch cut.

The plan is to make the frame as light as possible, so we used aluminium
for the bace of our frame.

My new work bench in my now very clean garage.
The door we using as the table top is a bit narrow so as soon
as we can get a new door we will replace it.

Filing down the noches in the 2 main struts to make them fit just right.

Well this is as far as we got the first night, reason being, as i was cutting the next bit i bumped our work light and blew the bulb so we had to call it quits for the night as we could not see a thing :(

Sunday

2008-04-07T06:27:00.001-07:00

Hahahaha... Wez thought it would be a good idea to cut his hair on his own..

See what happens when u cant see the back of your head...

Weekend Full Of Fun

2008-04-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

Well Friday started off with a bang...

We started at CoolRunnings where every one was looking a bit down from a long week at work... But the vibe soon picked up and we were all back on track for a great weekend..

After Cools we headed to Zeps...

Oh Ye and I had a hair cut on Friday too.. (Cuz Mandy refused to cut it for me)

Mabula Game Reserve

2008-03-25T02:40:00.001-07:00

Well the long weekend has come and gone... and what a weekend it has been.

All started with My Coke Fest and ended with a relaxing weekend away with Lerika and friends to a private house in Mabula Game Reserve.

The house was amazing and the view was like something out a magazine.

We spent our days eating, drinking, lazing in the jacuzzi and game spotting (game spotting was done from the deck with a sporing scope hehehe)

And nights were spent eating, drinking, lazing in the jacuzzi and listening to Stew's GREAT jokes :P

All in all it was a great weekend.

Number 3 Naka Sanga

Only took photos in the morning so was a bit misty... as soon as i get some taken by other people i will upload them as well.

My Coke Fest 2008

2008-03-25T02:19:00.000-07:00

Easter weekend is here and the weekend has started off with a huge bang, My coke Fest 2008 was AMAZING. There there were so many good international bands, too many to even start describing. Bands like 30 seconds to mars, KoRn, Muse, Good Charlete.... the list goes on and on.

Im off to a private game park today, its near mabula i think.. should be some great relaxing time with Lerika and friends.

KAISER CHIEFS

30 SECONDS TO MARS

Trip to the ZOO

2008-03-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

A bunch of us woke up in the morning and thought it would be a nice day to visit the PTA ZOO, So we all jumped in the car and headed down there.

Was a great day out and we saw so many cool animals.

Wez shat himself in the cable car as he is not one for heights or for small spaces but we finally got him up there. We then proceeded to rip him off about it the whole day.

Sharks vs Bulls

2008-03-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

Being the true supportes we were we headed off to the rugby despite the rain, The game was great and fun was had by all. (sharks won :D)

After the rugby we all walked from the stadium to the Square for a few beers.

New Home Here I Come

2007-08-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

Well its official... I get the keys to my new house tomorrow. Now all i have to worry about is moving all my stuff, which will be Fridays problem :) Really looking forward to moving though, because now to get to work all i have to do is walk 100m down the road and I'm knocking on my office door. In turn this means i now only have to get out of bed at about 8:45 to get to work by around 9:00 ish. Also no longer will i have to sit in the traffic in the morning. I will post some pics of the new place so you can all see.

In other news..... I will no longer be trekking down to durbz for the long weekend, as i found out today that Rhain will be out the country and that was my lift down. so will have to see if i can make another plan for another time.

Anyway Hope you all well...

Baz

2007-05-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Today was a strange day at work. very unproductive... Lieb said the same thing.. spent most of the day still converting videos, MOBI launch should just be round the corner now.

Took an amazing girl out to dinner last night, the place was great and the food was better but she took the cake...

Shew Im So Good Looking

2007-05-05T04:19:00.000-07:00

As soon as i get some time i will post something of relevance...

First Blog

2007-05-05T03:55:00.000-07:00

Good Times

At Splashy Fen