New toys!

Wow those are some great monitors -
And you play games ?

Yep, teachers do that too. :D In fact, the game was given to me by a professor (he had an extra copy).

For the record, I also build potato guns.

LOL :)
- whats a potato gun ? (do you mean potato launcher ?)
- how good are you at the game ?

Well, you take about six feet of pcv pipe with a larger chamber on one end, jam a potato into it, fill the chamber with propane, ignite it, and you can guess what happens from there...

It is literally a potato gun.

I'm not very good at Half Life. This is the first time I've played it.

Well i have no idea what you just said but by the way it sounds.... i would say that it shoots the potato with tremendous force :) - am i right ?

Yeah, that's the idea. I actually built a device to figure out exactly how fast it shoots them. I haven't head a chance to test it yet, but I would guess 200 to 300 miles per hour.

Here's the device, if you're interested:

http://www.blake-foster.com/timer.html

I don't have a pic of my potato gun, but if you do a Google image search, you'll see some others.

Wo, did you build that ?

Yeah. I actually want to rebuild it using a microcontroller (probably a Zilog Z80, the same proc used in the TI graphing calculators.)

Your a pretty cool teacher ! Compared to those lame dumb ones at my school... you get used to it....slowly !

And another thing please explain the thing above as i have no idea what any of it is :)

In other words, I want to rebuild the timer using a microcomputer to calculate the speed. The Z80 is a processor.

The current design only gives you the time, not the speed. You need to figure out the speed with a calculator. If I rebuilt it using a microcomputer, I could program it to calculate the speed automatically.

Here's a microcomputer I built that uses the Z80 processor.

http://www.blake-foster.com/z80.html