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Welcome cyber traveler! You have entered the realm of Project FRAC: a DIY robotics hobby project. This site chronicles the journey of an electronics amateur who is building a pet robot from scratch, plus associated topics like electronics, embedded computing and maker culture.

FRAC prototype 1This project aims to popularize (amateur) robotics by showing that entry-level resources and materials are available and affordable to anyone. A secondary aim is just to showcase this cool little hobby and get feedback from and engagement with the community: your ideas, experiences and reactions are much appreciated! read more...

Raspberry Pi Zero: 5 Original Project Ideas

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(The third part of a running mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero, the second part is here).

In my last post about the Raspberry Pi Zero, I promised to give some ideas for projects that would be well-suited to implement with our favorite little hobby SBC. Through logical reasoning, we determined that the qualities to look out for are “battery-powered, space-confined, camera-connected, slighty complex but not too performance-critical projects that could not be served by JustAnotherApp on your phone”. In order to keep this post short (and worth your read), I’m going to limit the list to the 5 project ideas that I think are most exciting and at least reasonably original (so, everything on this list is off-limits), and that I might actually consider doing myself. So, without further ado, some of my best ideas: read more...

Raspberry Pi Zero: Merits and Limitations

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(The second part of a running mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero, the first part is here).

The Raspberry Pi Zero is an amazing little tinkering trinket. It is among the smallest, cheapest and most efficient single board computers currently on the market, because of its radical design choices. First, it features almost no additional components besides the system-on-a-chip (SoC) and the RAM, which are stacked on top of each other. And second, its connectors are all chosen to be as flat as possible, making this the flattest offering on the market. Logically, these choices open up some doors while it closes others. Because of my personal interest in low-cost embedded/mobile/robotics projects, I’m mainly interested in the doors that open. What follows is thus a slightly biased analysis of the pros and cons of the Raspberry Pi Zero (version 1.3 available since May 2016). read more...

Raspberry Pi Zero: A Bit of History

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(The first part of a mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero).

We all loved the original Raspberry Pi premise; a small and modest yet very affordable and versatile single-board hobby computer that brought computing projects into homes and classrooms alike. They were not the first or the only one on that market, but they hit a sweet spot in terms of value for money and community building that resulted in an unprecedented buzz. read more...

Exit Mac, enter Windows

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After upgrading the OS on my 2008 MacBook Pro, it was struggling with today’s performance needs. The constant disk swapping because of insufficient RAM (2GB!) made the machine pretty unworkable; starting up or opening an app took several minutes, and for every mouse click or window switch there was a 20-30 freeze. Combining this with the fact that it did not have a battery nor a working DVD drive anymore, it unfortunately needed to be retired as my primary laptop. After some consideration, I decided to go for a brand spanking new Windows 10 machine instead, which can run everything robot that I used on my Mac. (Still no regrets after a couple of weeks of running with it). read more...

FRAC#2: Mobility Restored

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Last week, I finally received my new robot controller board after more than three weeks of waiting. Well, actually, a complete new robot kit, since the controller board is not sold separately. Good thing as well, because as it turns out, the original GoPiGo is not available anymore (in NL), and the new one I received is a GoPiGo2… which is not compatible with the original GoPiGo. Allow me to elaborate…. read more...