The Segfault

So I'm embarking on a project, sort of a hobby project. I'm working on building a homemade Segway-like vehicle. A couple other people have done this and documented it. The best one I've seen was put together by a fellow named Trevor Blackwell and is documented here. He seems to have money and didn't skimp on the parts he used. I, on the other hand, am a poor grad student. He doesn't give a total cost, but he does mention that his original version cost less than half as much as a real Segway, so let's say $2500. For his second version, his motors were $286 each (2), and the batteries were probably $18 each (60), so that's about $1650 already, and another $450 for the motor controllers makes it conceivable that it totaled more than $3000. I'm not going to spend nearly that much. I'm predicting about $500 total. A future post will detail my predicted cost breakdown. My next post, though, is going to be about the nifty features that I'm going to add, that the original Segway doesn't have.

By the way, as the title of this post indicates, I'm calling this project the "Segfault." Those computer geeks among you will recognize this term; for the rest of you, "segfault" is the commonly-used shortened form of "segmentation fault," a computer memory error. It came to mind when I was thinking of names for the project, and it seems to have stuck.