It all started by reading a webcomic

....well here goes. Hi I'm Phil and Welcome to my Blog. After many years of surfing the web, trading files on chat rooms, instant messaging people and making a few lame webpages; I've finally found a easy and usefull way to keep up to date on the web. And here it is. After all if a charactor in my favorite webcomic can make a blog than so can I. You'll never know what you might find posted here so check back often.

For tonight aside from starting this I wanted to show and tell of my latest project. Colette's Robot. Some of you may recall when Kristin had this assignment the beast i created for her was horrorendus. Not wanting to make another monster i decided it should be smaller and more user freindly this time. After some thinking i decided to loosly base this robot on Pintsize. I looked around the house and dug up some of my old computer hardware. Took an old motherboard, a CD drive, a hard drive, a 3 1/4 inch floppy drive and a power supply and slapped them together with some packing tape. I thought perhaps that might make the body so i left it on the counter over night and went to work in the morning. The next day Renee told me that Colette tried to pick up the bundle and found it was way too heavy for her to carry. I took that apart and decided in order to reduce the weight i had to further dismantle the components. First up was the power supply. A few screws and a few snips with my wirecutters and presto less weight. I decided to leave the cooling fan in place to help the realistic appearance of the robot when i'm done. Next was the Floppy drive. Looking at "Pintsize" as a model i noticed he did not have a floppy drive. Because i thought my AnthroPC might need one i decided to put one in there. I took a scrap Mitsumi drive and popped off the cover. I took the two springs that held the disc cage in place and carefully removed them then the cage came out easily. A few more screws and both the read/write head assembly, stepper motor and connector boards all came out. I placed the disc cage back into the drive and re-attached the springs. Then popped in a floppy to see and it still appears to work. Next was the CD drive. I couldn't get the bottom cover off cleanly so i broke the control board in the process of removing the bottom cover. Thats ok because i was going to scrap it anyway. After all that i descovered the top cover was much easier to remove. The top cover attached to the mid-plane and the disc tray slid along the mid-plane. I slid it out and removed the laser head/motor assembly and the rest of the guts. Then slid the tray back into the mid-plane and screwed the top cover back on. Since the hard drive would not be visible from the outside of the AnthroPC i decided to scrap the hard drive. Next I took the old motherboard and thought all i really wanted showing was the panel at the back where the keyboard, mouse and other ports where. So I took the cutters and mangled it down to only those connectors and the panel. I then took all these newly modifyed components and taped them together and I have this.......


....The cups you see are from Tim Hortons where I have been getting small double double coffees for the last 4 days. They will make the feet and forarms. The paper towel roll tube makes arms and when i get another one will be legs. The tape roll on the top is a prop to help conceptualize where the head will be. Well thats it for tonight, tomorrow i'll start the rest of the body.