I must have been living in a cave. I-Wei Huang has been building steam powered RC vehicles for a couple of years now. They are expensive, complicated, impractical, and basically just all around ridiculous. And he’s built lots of them. But there is just something cool about seeing and hearing these contraptions chugging along. Check out some of the videos on his site… this is one thing I definitely won’t be attempting to recreate.

Not quite a year ago, Spark Fun started carrying the first 5 Hz GPS module I can recall seeing. At $99, the price really isn’t that bad considering all of the cool stuff you could do with the faster position updates. I was blown away to find a company called Ohararp that is selling the exact same E-Tek EB-85A GPS module for only $55! It’s not very often you find that big of a swing in prices.

A guy known only as ChaN has got some serious engineering skills. His talents include hardware, software, firmware, DSP, etc, but the thing that always strikes me is his protoyping abilities. He hardly ever makes real PCBs, instead he prefers to use tiny enamel coated wire to make connections between itty-bitty surface mount parts. His latest project is no exception. I think the concept of moving the actual device around to control it is kind of goofy (it’s an MP3 player, not a Wii controller), but the implementation is something to behold. Check out the rest of his site, he’s done tons of cool stuff.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this page and signed up for a free MatchPort sample made by Lantronix. This sweet little device has an internal web server and allows you to send RS232 data over B/G wifi networks at up to 921 kB/s. My sample part showed up last Friday and I can imagine all kinds of cool stuff to do with it. I’ll have to finish up my other projects before I do anything with it though…

So I finished up the PCB design, ordered boards, and populated one board. The LM3404 based current regulators work fine, but I haven’t scoped the critical signals yet to make sure there are no serious problems. I need to get an IR receiver (the missing 3 pin device on the bottom right corner of the board) and write the firmware. I think the pushbutton will be used to select different fade effects. I also need to buy some RGB LEDs, currently I am just using white 3 watt Cree LEDs. They are INSANELY bright. Once the firmware is finished up, I will post the Eagle files, gerbers, and firmware for all to enjoy.