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Originally Posted by tcj103
A local Radio Shack employee told me they were re-aligning their stores. Some would be carrying less hobby related items, like resistors, transistors, soldering irons, etc and concentrate more on the consumer electronics items like Ipods and cell phones. Others would continue to carry the hobby items.
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I heard exactly the same thing from two local RS managers. Thankfully, the closer of the two was one of the 'hobby' stores...
I ended up buying one or two of everything but the metal and ultrasonics - you never know what you might like to fool with.
My current summer project is to build and program a small robot (about 1/2 FRC size) to harass the local wildlife. I live on a suburban lot, and have deer, woodchucks, a skunk family and a plethora of chipmunks that I'd like to make life less comfortable for. (The squirrels, I've given up on. They Win).
The idea is to sense movement, determine if it's a critter, then move towards it making noise, all staying within specific boundaries (the lawn). When battery gets low, it finds and connects to a charging port, then goes out again waiting and watching...
The 'sense movement' part is the hardest, I'm working on a combination of motion sensor and IR camera. Unsure if I'll get it to work, but that's no reason to not try.
Don