Linear 4-finger grabber
I originally made this design for a small scale pneumatic robotic arm which included a multiplexed pneumatic control station. I here present you a revamped version of it: (LDraw file available soon, my Brickshelf account is under maintenance apparently) This design works with both with pneumatics and linear accumulators. The tubing will be a bit … Read more
![[Commie] Another - logo](http://spillerrec.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/commie-another-logo.png?w=440&h=240&crop=1 "[Commie] Another - logo"){kind=logo}
Another – first impressions
I try to keep anime off this blog, but I still wanted to bring this series up. There isn’t really that much interesting anime this season, actually there is only one series that I’m looking forward to and that is “Another”. It is a horror series which started airing this month and the fourth episode … Read more
Mechanic NOR gate
Several years ago I tinkered around with making mechanic logic gates, so the LEGO Answers question: Is it possible to build simple logic gates with LEGO mechanics? caught my interest. Keshav Saharia blog post Mechanical computation from Lego bricks was interesting, but I was not quite satisfied with his NOR gate. First of all the OR … Read more
9392 Quad Bike – review
One of the new Technic sets, the 9392 Quad Bike, looked rather interesting to me since it has 3 springs, chains links and that the price is low as it is a small set. So I went ahead and bought one. Building The build was fairly straightforward and if you know what you are doing … Read more
Color-independent CSS with alpha overlays
This sidebar design caught my eye: There are several of these boxes in different colors and I kinda liked the effect. To create this effect two images are used, one which contains the top part of the box, including the rounded corners and another which just contains the rounded corners for the bottom. (These needs … Read more
Saving images in the correct format
I quite often see images stored in wrong formats, see for example this website: http://www.retrofit-anime.com/index.html. Notice the gradient, it contains ugly lines moving from top to bottom. (More visible on a dark background.) It was properly saved as a 1px high image and then stretched downwards (in order to make the file smaller), however it … Read more
RICcreator – October update
Focus this time has been mostly on sprite creation/editing, with a few nice additions. Polygon enhancements The last missing piece in the drawing routine was fill_shape in PolyOut(), which has now been implemented. Here is an example: Originally I planned on just using the code from the firmware however when I did so I noticed … Read more
Simple editor in RICcreator
To show a nxtCanvas in QT I made a custom widget called nxtCanvasWidget. nxtCanvasWidget implements everything needed to view, move and edit nxtCanvas. However to add scroolbars I had to create another widget, which is named nxtCanvasWidgetContainer and which contains a nxtCanvasWidget. However it does not include the interface needed to do editing, so another … Read more
Password security
After about 3 years of using the same password I decided it was about to create a new one. I simple don’t think my password is secure enough. But how do you make a secure password? Common guidelines:[1] Keep the password at least 8 characters long. Use mixed case letters and mix in numbers. Include … Read more
MainWindow vs. Editor
RICcreator is a MDI application which is implemented by using tabs. Because tabs are used, only one document is viewed at a time. Up to this point it was implemented using QTabWidget which provides tabs and a area on each tab to place widgets in. Using this, a editor (ricfile_widget) was created on each tab … Read more
