I haven’t worked on this project much for the last six months. Between full-time school and a full-time job, it was really very difficult to spare time for anything else. Having made this project into a priority for my eductional efforts helps me to justify working on it.
Given the difficulty I’ve run into getting a C compiler for the PIC to work on Mac OS X, and taking the advice of a friend, I’m going to switch from plans to use a PIC18Fxxx to instead using an Atmel AVR. There’s an open-source toolchain that works on Mac OS X and includes gcc. I expect the programmer and chips to arrive on Wednesday.
In the meantime, I’ve discovered the Parallax Basic Stamp. I don’t really intend to do too much work in Basic, but thanks to the availability of the very nice MacBS2, I bought a BS2p40 from JameCo and had it blinking an LED in under an hour (including the time it took to make a serial cable).
We’ll see if I can make it interface to the MMC and inertial sensors; it has no A-to-D converter, so I’ll either have to add one, or find some alternative. I don’t know what peripherals are available on the SX core used in the BS2, and I really don’t know if it will be fast enough to do all the necessary things.
I’ve added some shots of the ’bot so that you can see there’s more to it than just some beautiful hubs & tires.

I’m watching the egress of Opportunity live on NASA TV right now. Very exciting. I wish there was more live video.

It’s about 0127 PST, and I'm watching the NASA channel live showing us the MER mission control room as the first batch of images comes in from Opportunity, the second of two amazing Mars rovers.
The terrain surrounding Opportunity in Meridiani Planum, is so amazing looking. Unlike the rocky surface we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on all the Mars images we typically see, Meridiani is very smooth. But, there are these amazing outcroppings of rock structures in view that are very exciting to the scientists, and to me!
I really wish JPL would give us an audio track that’s just the comm chatter, without the commentators. They’re trying to explain things, but I’d really rather just listen to the scientists and engineers.
Spirit, after getting a little sick, seems to be doing much better. Once again, congratulations to the JPL team. You’ve done amazing work, and have made me very proud.
Check out the mission at the MER Mission Home Page. They’ve gotten over four billion hits in the last 24 days. That’s about 1929 hits per second!

As I feared, Bush Jr. announced a new plan for space exploration, containing a terribly misguided “extended human presence on the moon”. I’ve come to recognize this as typical of politicians in general and of Bush in particular.
I fully applaud refocussing NASA and the space program to support sending humans to Mars. However, the science and engineering goals and constraints are best served by Dr. Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct approach.
I’m not going to try to argue the merits of manned exploration to Mars. That’s a huge subject all by itself. Thankfully, this administration and most of Washington seems to accept the need.
Typical Mars mission plans (including Bush’s) call for the assembly of large spacecraft in orbit (or on the moon), a process which requires multiple launches of heavy lift vehicles. These have been deemed so expensive as to relegate such programs to future generations.¹
Commentary I heard on NPR today suggests that we can expect the return to the moon by 2020 and humans on Mars by mid-century, at a cost of $1 trillion. Personally, I plan to see humans land on Mars. In 2050, I’ll turn 81. It’s likely I’ll be alive, but I’d sure hate to miss it because of senility or death.
Dr. Zubrin and others have for years espoused a plan that can get humans to Mars in ten years, for a fraction of the cost, by skipping the moon. There’s no scientific reason to go to the moon, and no good plan for Mars requires mining the moon or using it as a shipyard.
I’ll try to post more information on this subject soon. In the meantime, check out these links:

• NASA’s Mars Direct Page
• Mars Direct Home Page
• International Conference for the Exploration and Colonization of Mars
• NASA Ames Center for Mars Exploration

And I encourage you to read Dr. Zubrin’s book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet.
¹Zubrin, Robert M., Practical Methods for Near-Term Piloted Mars Missions.

Congratulations to the Mars Exploration Rover team at JPL for their successful Mars landing, 20:35 on 1/3/2004. By all accounts, everything is going better than expected.
I envy you guys and wish you all the best in the coming weeks.