The motivation for this was a certain birthday present I recently received. Needless to say, I played with the droid as it shipped for about an hour, and then promptly struck out on the googlescape to find out what kinds of hacks people had done with these things.
A popular one seems to be to put a spy camera inside the head, but I have no real use for this. I briefly pondered adding a miniature arc welder (complete with Van De Graaff generator for lifelike sparking action!) but eventually decided against it.
I'm still not sure what to do with my R2 droid (aside from reassemble it eventually and use it as intended). However, I've definitely gotten my electronics toolkit dusted off again.
Here we can see a peek into the lair:
Accomplishments thus far
It took the better part of yesterday afternoon and a decent chunk of this past night, but I finally got my NEC V850 microcontroller working. I was hoping to take advantage of the on-chip debugging tools I got with it, but apparently the universe has a vendetta against me at the moment.
Instead, I simply have to compile and build the ROM on my desktop, upload it to the V850, and then run the thing by itself off a standalone power supply. This works fine when your test code is basically blinking a couple of LEDs on and off; but as soon as I want to do anything more sophisticated, I'm going to probably have to take another crack at the debugger.
Tune in next time for a glimpse of my first homebrew microcontroller code. You know you want it.
