Current mood:	excited
Current music:	Versch Gear Choir - Full BAZ PTS

NRRRRRR I HAVE 350 GBAs. NRRRRRRRRR NONE OF THEM ARE FAKE.
So, as most of you know (because I talk about it all the fucking time, 'cause I think it makes me cool), I work at The KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. We run the Botball competition for high school and college students.

In past years, we've used the Handyboard and Lego RCX for our competition.

The Handyboard is a decent little 68HC11 based hobbyist robotics board. Not horribly special, can do better stuff than a lot of the newer current competing BASIC STAMP based boards, but it's still not "modern" technology, since it was based off the 6.270 MIT board built in 1990.

The RCX is a yellow piece of shit. Sure, enough people have started their robotics hobbys or careers on it, but it's so far behind in terms of power and usefulness that outgrowing it takes no time, and there are better boards to start out on that will allow for much more growth.

This year we decided to chuck the RCX. We took a look a quite a few boards, but ended up on the Charmed Labs Xport Robot Controller.

This board 0wnz0rz, to put it technically. The controller is the combination of two boards. First off is the Charmed Labs Xport Board. This is an FPGA controller board that hooks into a Nintendo Gameboy Advance (using its CPU for main processing and the FPGA for I/O control) with two IDE-style connectors for user additions. Projects like the Iridium Flare Tracker have been done with this board. On top of that is added the Xport Robot Controller board, which takes up one of the header banks (So you're still free to play with the other bank, wheeee). It's got 4 motor ports, 8 analog sensor ports and 8 digital sensor ports. The awesome part is the motor control, full closed loop back-EMF control to the little gray lego motors (if anyone wants me to explain why this is incredibly fucking cool, just leave a comment, I won't bore you with it here :) ). Full gcc based toolchain, C/C++ libraries as well as being able to use ARM/THUMB through the GBA processor. So awesome.

This is the board I lusted after. It just kicks ass in so many ways. The only problem.... How to get a BUNCH of gameboys to go with it, as cheaply as possible.

The hunt began in June. Tried to getting a donation from Nintendo, but they use what could possibly be the most fucked up system on the face of the Earth to handle donation inquiries. No dice, never even got to present them with the idea.

Tried Gamestop. After 3 weeks of phone tag and middle-management passing annoyance, they came back and told us they would only sell us new GBA SPs in bulk, at street price. NOT ONLY THAT, we had to buy one accessory with each gameboy, because GBAs are a loss leader for them.

Fuck a whole bunch of that noise.

Tried the local Game Xchange chain. Nice people, but not really all that expediant on this process. Never really heard anything from them.

Tried Nintendo again, this time just figuring we'd order them bulk and see if there was any discount.

Nope.

Here we are in September now, 4 months from having to ship these damn things out to teams. Hurricane season seems to be effecting Shit Creek, and everyone else already bought out all the paddles.

2 weeks ago, Nintendo dropped prices on the GBA, since the DS comes out in a little over 2 months. With that, used prices dropped. Regular (non-SP) GBAs showed up on sale at Gamestop for cheapcheapcheap.

We had two ways to go here. I could either buy every GBA in Oklahoma, which would require a lot of driving and hauling stuff around.

Or we could just go on Gamestop's website and order 350 GBAs.

Now, I KNOW anyone that's ever shopped on the internet has done this. "Heh, I only need one, but I wonder if it'd let me order a BIG OL' HOJILLION OF UM?!". My roommates and I joked about this idea the night before, some poor order guy thinking we'd stolen a credit card, Gamestop starting up legal action, etc etc etc...

Went into work the next day and recommended both plans of action.

An hour later, we were on the Gamestop website, ordering 350 GBAs.

The wait began. We'd never been able to get ahold of Gamestop before, so we didn't know if they'd even try and contact us on the whole thing, or what.

And then today, they came. Ironically enough, they showed up during the 10 minutes I'd taken to run home to get my personal GBA so I could work on it today.

There are 350 GBAs sitting outside my office.

350.

350. GBAS. 10 FEET AWAY FROM ME.










Now I have to port our language, Interactive C, to the boards, and have it up and running sometime in the next two weeks. Yet, here I am, writing a blog entry instead.

What a child of the digital age I am.