In fact, although I don't want to stress out too much about Bing's construction, I thought it prudent (due to the complete lack of tangible progress in almost a month of Bing stuff) to put together a development timeline so I can tell how I am doing progress-wise.  This led me to believe that it will be a challenge to do what I want in the time I have.  Oh well, I can only try.  Current status on the timeline for the 13 critical subsystems I have identified can now be found on the bottom of the main web page.  Someday maybe I'll enter the whole grid but it is kind of a lot of stuff and I'm not sure how to present it (plus it is probably not that interesting).

I've been reporting "no progress" on the "Brains" section above but that isn't entirely true.  I have been spending some quality time researching a good platform for the main controller for Bing and it has been very enjoyable.  I had decided a couple of weeks ago on using the Motorola 68332 and had actually ordered a board that looked really cool from a guy  on the web, but alas after a delay he told me he wouldn't make any more.  Ugh.  So, back to the drawing board, I decided on a different controller chip entirely and have just ordered a different board.  I am eager to reveal which controller chip I have chosen and talk about it but will not do so until I have the thing in my hands and have it sending data to my PC to prove that it works.  Stay tuned.

I did begin to actually get my hands dirty a bit: I haven't really done anything with electronics and a few weeks ago I thought a breadboard was a handy thing to chop vegetables on.  So I picked a first project and have been slowly progressing towards the completion of "Phase One" of the vision subsystem for Bing, which is to get an Atmel AVR microcontroller (a 4434, for the curious) to fetch images from a Gameboy camera that I got from buy.com for $12 a few weeks ago.  A guy named Andy Clark has a site on the net that describes in medium detail how he has done exactly this before so that is a decent reference for me, although I don't understand all of it yet.  My application differs from his in a few more or less important ways and I'm writing the Atmel So far, I have accomplished the following:

• Successfully got the chip and its clock to work on my breadboard.
• Successfully assembled a program and transferred it to the chip via my computer's parallel port.
• Tore the Gameboy camera out of its enclosure and laboriously ripped the little connector off of the larger PCB to which it is attached (and which I will now discard).  This was a major pain.  I will build a cable for this connector which will be a challenge since it is so small and I don't recall ever soldering anything before.
• Got the AVR to light up an LED.
• The big one: hooked the AVR up to a Maxim MAX243CPE RS232-driver chip and wrote a Windows program and an AVR assembler program to make them talk to each other.  Very cool.  I've also been reading about A/D converters and SRAM and so on so with luck I'll have something real to report as progress next week.

As part of my "infrastructure" and "environment" building I found the cheapest place on the web I could find to order a Sherline mill, which is featured in this week's picture.  Nice piece of machinery, and I'll use it for lots of stuff.  I have budgeted for this (and a CNC conversion will add considerably more cost soon), so don't worry!

That's all for now.