I have overcome my fear of soldering irons!

[rbandrews]

My Roomba was broken. I figured out how, and why, and soldered the broken bits back together. It works! I've actually soldered something, and not only did I not burn myself, but the something works! Must find more things to solder. Maybe go this weekend and buy a kit from EPO (Electronic Parts Outlet, sort of like a high tech thrift store, much NASA surplus junk and related goodies. Dave and Shawn would love it).

Also, I want an iPhone, if just to have a portable thing that runs Dashboard widgets. What a brilliant idea. Dunno if I'm willing to move away from T-Mobile though. I'm certainly not willing to change my phone number.

Update: Got home and it had stopped working again. However, on cracking it open it became obvious that it wasn't my joint that broke, but the other one on the same sensor. Maybe the guy was just lazy or used cheap solder or something. So one more dot of solder and it's happily cleaning away, fulfilling it's humble robotic purpose for existence. Other geeks will be happy to know that there's nothing in the robot that isn't user-servicable, for users handy with a screwdriver. Everything seems to be held together with easily-accessible wires and snaps.

Comments

[wyrdone.livejournal.com]

It's a GSM phone. Some of the network specific widgets (like some of the online services) may not work, but it's still a GMS smart phone.

I expect that T-Mobile and the rest of them will have licesning contracts soon enough.

[vond.livejournal.com]

They're Cingular-exclusive through 2009. Assuming that the phone is locked and Cingular won't unlock it and nobody hacks the lock, it won't work on T-Mobile. Of course I consider it highly likely that people will find an unlock hack nearly immediately :)

[rbandrews]

I rate that as extremely likely as well. However, I rate it as much less likely that I will be willing to pay for an unlocked one, instead of a subsidized Cingular one.