Author Archives: superfro - Page 5

Using VirtualBox without the GUI

Posted by superfro on March 18, 2013 No comments

Very frequently I have the need to use a Windows XP machine remotely, this virtual machine is set up on my local server so I don’t really run a GUI all the time on it. So what I’ve done is (using the GUI) set up VirtualBox, installed / configured it then shut it down. To bring the machine I made a quick bash script:

#!/bin/sh
VBoxHeadless -s "Windows XP VM"

And run it from within screen (to keep the process alive after disconnect). After that I just RDP into the box and use it like a home away from home. Pretty handy, especially if you had a multitude of machines you wanted to bring up and use then shut down without having to first vnc/remote into another gui, then start the virtualbox gui, and use the gui from a gui gui gu gui… gui.

Hexy’s power woes revisited

Posted by superfro on March 15, 2013 No comments

I found this great article (where I shamelessly stole the image to the left from) it has a lot of stress testing on different alkalines and they threw in some rechargables. You can clearly see by the graph that most alkalines are going to buckle real fast when you try to draw 2 amps from them. This makes sense because when I was using the alkalines the result was much worse than the bench power supply (which current limits shortly after 3A). If you look further down he does this test on some NIMH cells and he was able to get 5A out of it without too much voltage drop. This is clearly the explanation why the alkalines were so horrible. So I got a few different power options coming. I got some cheap buck regulators from fleabay and some cells coming. Hopefully it’s sufficient to at least run through the demo software properly!

Hexy the Hexapod build

Posted by superfro on March 14, 2013 No comments

2013-03-14 02.31.30 I got my Hexy the hexapod kit from the kickstarter finally, maybe 6 months late. Reasonable in kickstarter terms. Anyhoo I decided to put it together last night. The build process was pretty straight forward, however towards the end when you get into like mounting the battery pack / routing wires / etc things get a little sketchy. I guess my biggest gripe right now would be with the power, I need to order some lithium/nimh cells or do a custom battery pack or something. Alkalines aren’t goint to cut it. I was a little sad not to have gotten much movement out of it. I even hooked it up to my bench power supply but it maxxed it out at 3A and still just failed.