josh.wilsdon.ca

Slow but Steady

2011-11-28T00:00:00-08:00

It’s been a long time since my last post already. It seems like I’m always making the same excuse that I’ve been busy at work, but you never run out of things that need to be done with complex software. Despite the fact that I’ve spent most of my time working, I have found some time to make forward progress on my RepRap. As you can see from the menu, I’ve also added a RepRap page for people who only want to look at RepRap posts and not the rest of my ramblings.

At this point I’ve completed the mounting of the steppers for all axes. You can see what it looked like after I completed that here:

an astute observer will see that there are 2 steppers that control the z-axis, these will be run in parallel. Then there is one stepper for each of the x and y axis. These are belt driven and move the extruder and build platform respectively.

Here’s a close-up of the stepper that drives the x-axis:

once I got all the axis put together, I moved on to the extruder + hot-end.

It is really overwhelming to look at the available information on hot-ends and extruders. There are so many variations and combinations that I really didn’t know what to do. So I ended up just basically picking some parts, reading through a few things and putting them together. Hopefully this works! The hot end is basically going to be a block of aluminum screwed onto a brass insert which itself is screwed into a PTFE (teflon) barrel. I drilled the PTFE by hand holding the drill bit in my hand and turning the part and the bit opposite directions. I was able to get much more control this way as I have no drill press nor even an accurate drill. I then drilled two holes in the sides so that it can be attached to the extruder, it looks like this:

This piece goes into the extruder which was quite a complicated bit to put together. This is what it looked like part-way through construction:

And this is what it looks like now with the PFTE barrel also attached:

and:

I’ve manually pushed some filament into the extruder and rotated the gears and it pulled through. Hopefully it works well when powered up.

Speaking of power, the next step after getting most of the extruder put together and mounted is wiring everything up. I decided I wanted to do something special with the power switch as I had a red missile-launch style switch cover that I’d bought previously. I hooked it up like this:

with a dual-color red-green LED. When the machine is connected to the power supply but the power supply is in standby (switch is off) the LED is red. When you flip the switch the power supply turns on and the LED turns green. This seemed like it should be very simple but turned out to be one of the more complicated things I’ve done on this build so far. I did learn some things along the way though about using transistors and NOR gates, so this was worth while. And now it works.

The final bit I’ll include in this update is a bit about the endstops I’m building. I chose optical endstops because again it wasn’t clear to me yet why I’d choose one over the other and the optical ones seemed cooler. The purpose of these is to signal the controller when the build plate has travelled the maximum distance in one direction. Eventually I might want 6 of these but it seems like most people use 3, so that’s what I’m going to start with too. These came in kit form so I’ve got to solder them. Here’s one complete and one not yet started:

And that’s all the pictures I’ve got for this update.

Things that I’ve still got to do before I can get printing include:

finishing the other 2 end-stops
finishing wiring everything up
finish the build platform
mount the endstops
mount the resistor and thermistor in the aluminum block and test that out
calibrate the axes
figure out how I’m going to spool the filament into the extruder
figure out how to use the software

That sounds like a lot of work. Hopefully I’ll have time for an update again before Christmas.

Spain!

2011-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

I just recently got back from Spain. It’s hard to summarize our whole epic 6-day trip in a blog post, but it was also exciting enough that I want to write something about it. I’m sure I’ve already forgotten places (just going from memory and Google searches, not bothering to look elsewhere) we went and I’m not going to spend too much time describing everything. I might update this post from time to time as I remember stuff. My wife and I went there for Pedro’s wedding. Before the wedding, we traveled through the 3 largest cities in Spain in descending order by population. We went first to Madrid.

Madrid

Madrid is a pretty big place. We took the Aeropuerto Express to Atocha which went pretty smoothly and was quite a bit cheaper than a cab ride would have been. When we got to Atocha however we had a bit of trouble finding our way to the hotel. We had a couple maps, but unfortunately it turned out the Google Map was wrong. It also took us quite a while to get used to the fact that street names can change from one block to the next. Because of that, it’s not always easy to figure out how to get somewhere when you just have the name of the street you’re going to. The good thing about getting lost though is that we saw lots of interesting buildings and stuff on the way that we probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

After we finally got to our hotel and checked in, we went out and walked around to a bunch of places in Madrid. We went to:

Museo Del Prado
Santa María la Real de La Almudena (+ the crypt)
Palacio Real (and the Royal Armory)
Plaza Mayor
Puerta del Sol
Some more places I already forgot

We also went to some place that had a bunch of drinks and tapas type food after walking around all over the place and had a bunch of tasty stuff. This is where I first tried the acorn fed Iberian ham.

Overall Madrid felt like a big city, but in Spain, with lots of people around speaking Spanish. It was relatively clean and there’s lots of interesting stuff to see.

Barcelona

Barcelona was about 3 hours by train from Madrid. After we got there, we were able to take the local metro system all over Barcelona. We rode the metro most of the places (except the bus we got on which was the wrong one) we went in Barcelona and it was cheap and pretty efficient. I’d definitely recommend it.

In Barcelona we saw:

Sagrada Familia (and went up to the top!)
A bunch of the downtown when we took the bus the wrong way
Christopher Columbus Monument
Port Vell (and saw the ‘swing bridge’ swing)

While Barcelona was nice, it felt kind of touristy to me. I think I’d go back because the Sagrada Familia was so impressive, but Barcelona was not #1 on my list.

Valencia

The train to Valencia from Barcelona took about 3 hours and was pretty nice as we got to see the ocean, some small port towns and some countryside. When we got to Valencia we checked in to the hotel and then walked around to:

Valencia Cathedral (We saw the Holy Grail!)
Torres de Serranos (We got to go to the top of the towers)
Plaza de la Reina
Mercado Central (where Kazuha got to try the Oranges she’d been looking for)
Plaza Redonda
Plaza de Toros (walked by, didn’t get to go in)
Shopping (Kazuha enjoyed the shopping here!)

I really liked Valencia. It seemed to have a really nice atmosphere and I’d like to go back. Like everywhere else there’s lots of old stuff, but there is also a really big park that used to be a river that I’d like to spend more time exploring next time. Valencia seems like a really good place to go for a walk.

Murcia

In Murcia we saw:

Pedro! (and several other fellow “Joyeurs” and spouses)
Pedro’s wedding! (It was pretty nice ceremony)
The reception after Pedro’s wedding! (Also great, tasty food + drinks, lots of Pedro’s family)
The Cathedral (Which I was told by Pedro’s brother-in-law is the only thing worth seeing in Murcia)

I think I’d like to go back to Murcia again despite the fact that I was told there’s not much to see. Just seeing the old buildings and stuff was pretty cool and the area around the Cathedral was pretty nice. We had a really good time at the wedding and reception and enjoyed the experience.

Thanks for inviting us Pedro!

We went back to Madrid the day after the wedding and got in late to Madrid. We walked around Atocha a bit and saw the garden but then went to our hotel near the airport. In the morning we had to get up early to go to the airport to come home. It was great being in Spain, but I also missed my kids! So it was nice to get home and see them again. Hopefully someday we’ll be able to all go to Spain together!

General Observations

I never really thought about how much of a desert Spain is. It’s really bare all the places we saw away from the coast.
Spanish kings (and knights) used to be really small dudes.
The national sport seems to be smoking, and people are always practicing.
There are not really any houses anywhere near city as far as I can tell. Everything is apartments.
Food + drinks were much cheaper than I expected.
Portion sizes at cafe’s and restaurants were also bigger than I expected.
Iberian ham seems to be the most popular food in Spain. (and it’s really tasty)
Canada customs also loves Iberian ham. They stole ours after wasting our time. I bet they enjoyed it!
Several places, beer was cheaper than water.
Remember to carry 50 Euro-cent coins for the toilet.
The metro system in Barcelona is a great way to get around.
It’s hard to find WiFi in Spain, except at McDonalds. (which also sells beer!)
If you’re used to having the Internet in your pocket, you’ll miss it when you don’t.
Lots of cathedrals.
Muslims and Christians repeatedly took over different parts of Spain and burned each others stuff down, replacing it with their own.
All traffic signs, signals and markings are optional in Spain.
If the line for X-raying your bag is taking too long, it’s ok to give up and walk around it and just get on the train.
Entering Europe is way less painful than entering Canada. Even for Canadians.
Don’t choose seats in row 1 or 2 on a Renfe train unless you know the people in the other. 1a and 2a face each other for example.
Gaudi was pretty cool.
I’m not much of a fan of Picasso’s paintings.
A backpack is the best way to carry your stuff, if you have to carry stuff.
It’s important to blow stuff up and shoot rockets at a Spanish wedding.
If you’re on a train in Spain you should talk loudly and constantly on your phone.
Everything’s made of dirt, rocks or some combination: concrete, clay tiles, bricks, etc.
It seems like it’s pretty normal to be out late on weekdays, and pretty quiet out before ~10am.
If you’re not a fan of shopping, being in Spain doesn’t make it much better.

Conclusion

We really enjoyed our trip to Spain and this trip has encouraged us to want to go back to see more of Europe as well. Especially more hams and cheeses.

RepRap build has started

2011-09-06T00:00:00-07:00

All the parts I ordered have arrived and I’ve been able to get started on my RepRap. This is what it looks like currently:

As you can see, I’ve got the frame mostly together. The aluminum plate you see in the picture is not yet attached and that’s what I’m working on currently. That is the lower part of the build platform and attaches to some PLA bushings that snap onto the smooth rods to allow movement on the y axis. I’m still working out the way to get these to move smoothly and get the plate mounted straight. Unfortunately in the process I’ve already broken one of my bushings, hopefully that’s the only one:

The only other thing I’ve had to really figure out so far (there is some pretty good build documentation out there) was what to do with some parts that were not quite as perfect as I’d like. As I mentioned in my last post, I bought my initial RepRap parts from some random dude on Ebay. All of the parts have a number of imperfections which I’m hoping will not ultimately impact the accuracy of my machine. These look like:

and

and really all the parts have looked something like that. I’ve spent a lot of time with an X-acto knife cutting away as much of these as I can. Hopefully my parts will come out looking better eventually!

Get ready for plastic

2011-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

For a while now I’ve been talking about making a hexapod.. I even went so far as ordering some parts and putting together servos and a server controller and making some stuff move. The problem I soon ran into though was that building a hexapod requires either buying or making a lot of parts. Each leg needs several brackets for the servos in order to make joints. When I started looking into these I found that most of these were either expensive, or complicated for me to build myself.

I’ve heard of RepRap before, but never actually seen one in person. Earlier this year when I went to the Mini Maker Faire in Vancouver, there were several people with both CNC and plastic printing machines. These were actually even more cool than I realized. I then started thinking about making the servo brackets for my hexapod using printed plastic. Which led me to read a bunch about the current state of these printers. I found the amazing hydraraptor and many other sources. It seems that with enough work you can get pretty decent quality prints.

The next stage in making a RepRap, after deciding you’re going to do so seems to be investigating all the options. There are a lot of different options when building a 3d printer. Even among RepRaps there are several variants in both metric and SAE, there are all sorts of different options for electronics to drive things, different extruder designs and different print beds. After reading about these different options, I decided that to start with I’m going to try to choose the most common options so I can get up and running as fast as possible. Then I can work on tweaking the setup and potentially print myself the parts to make another variant if I want. It seems 3d printing is a hobby in itself.

The decisions I made at this point are to go with the:

Prusa Mendel
RAMPS shield with an Arduino Mega
PC Power Supply
Optical Endstops
PLA plastic
ordering the printed Prusa parts on Ebay since all the online stores seemed to be out of stock.

I wanted to order more of the electronics parts in components so that I could assemble them, but it seemed like it was cheaper to just buy those pre-assembled which will I guess leave me more time to get the rest working properly. So, at this point I’ve ordered what I hope are all the parts I need to actually get started printing and am waiting for enough of them to arrive for me to get started putting things together. The plastic parts I ordered from some random guy on Ebay have arrived already, which is nice. They seem to be “ok” build quality though I’m hoping I’ll be able to do better eventually. Then maybe I’ll sell the parts myself.

Anyway, that’s it for this post. Expect future posts to include more details on how construction is going.

Whoa! It's been a while!

2011-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted now and even longer since I posted regularly. I won the challenge for 2010, but that didn’t continue into 2011. Even if it had I’d still be ahead of Kevin and — with this post — tied with Howie. Kevin’s last post is almost 1 year ago and Howie’s only posted two so far this year too.

I’ve been really busy this year in the first two quarters. Working hard on some awesome new stuff at Joyent has left me with little time for other things. I have realized though that I’ve been missing doing work on my personal projects so I’m going to try to start doing more of that. To try to encourage myself, I’m going to try to start blogging more again. I am not going to commit to blogging every week again, but I’ll try to start posting updates again.

Over the coming while I hope to write about some of the things I want to be working on including:

(yet unnamed) hexapod!
RepRap
Maple
Pololu Maestro
A solar charger

Hopefully some of this will be interesting to read.

The Fearless Honey Badger

2011-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

The Honey Badger is one of the worlds toughest creatures.

Contrary to what you’d expect from their name, honey badgers are not actually badgers. While badgers are pretty tough animals, they are not nearly as tough as honey badgers. For an example of just how tough the fearless a honey badger is, see this video:

especially the parts where the honey badger climbs a tree just to attack a Cobra and when the honey badger takes the food a Puff Ader is eating, eats it in front of him and then goes after the puff ader itself. Being poisoned by one of the worlds most venomous vipers, he needs a nap. After his nap, he finishes eating the puff ader and goes on looking for some more trouble.

Long story short: If you’re in Africa, watch out for Honey Badgers!

Last Post!

2010-12-29T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve been away for part of the holidays and haven’t had much time to write anything up. I’ve also not spent much time deciding whether I’m going to keep blogging next year. I did take a quick look at the Project 52 site and noticed they’re going to try again this year. That’s not going to make much difference in my decision making process because I don’t really believe they’ll make it very far this year, since they failed so fast last year.

I did want to thank those readers who have been reading my blog this year. If I’m going to continue posting, I’ll make it a goal to set it up so you can comment on my posts early next year.

Blogging every week has been pretty hard. I do think I’ve learned more about what makes for an interesting post (yeah, this isn’t it) but those require even more work. I’m going to try to make more of the interesting sort next year and fewer of these lame meta posts. I could also decide not to post some weeks if it’s only going to be a lame post, because maybe it’s better to not post than to post something lame.

Either way, check out the scoreboard and see how thoroughly Howie and Kevin failed. It’s pretty impressive. Kevin hasn’t posted since July!

Anyway, Happy new year! I guess you’ll find out next week if I’m going to keep posting!

Why not ride a bike?

2010-12-22T00:00:00-08:00

After my last post I got some feedback from one of my readers. Note that’s plural, I now have confirmed more than one person is reading this blog. The comment I received was basically suggesting that instead taking the bus, I should ride a bike. I was pointed to this page listing 60 benefits of cycling. I actually did try this for a few weeks before back when I was also working in Surrey. Unfortunately I am too much of a wuss to keep it up. Flat tires every week and several close calls with cars (there aren’t bike lanes most of the way I need to go) already made it frustrating. When I finally got hit by a car and had to deal with the police over a driver who took off after hitting me, I gave up on it. Just too dangerous thanks to people driving cars. Maybe I’m a wuss, but I’d rather walk… And I did for more than 2 years until I started working much further away.

Anyway, what I was actually going to write about here is the possibility of adding comments to this blog so that people can comment and I can respond. I tried to add comments before using intensedebate.com but found that it slowed down the load of the page far too much. Another thing I’m really worried about is the fact that I see so many blogs out there with comments full of spam, and on top of that I’ll feel an obligation to respond to legitimate comments. That is going to take even more time and blogging every week is already somewhat taxing when I’m really busy. I discussed this with (I assume) my most loyal reader and the offer was made to help cultivate the comments, but I’m not sure he has time to do that either.

An even more important question, I think, is whether I’d continue blogging or not. Because if I’m not going to continue blogging regularly comments are probably less important. So am I going to keep blogging? I don’t know yet. I’m still thinking about it. Maybe I’ll come up with an answer for next week. Next week will also be post #52 this year! Which means I will have completed the goal I set out at the beginning of the year.

Once again on the train

2010-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

It’s already been more than a week since my last post! That’s almost impossible to believe. “Time flies when you’re having fun” though, is something to which I can attest. I’ve been really enjoying the opportunity to dig into a pretty ambitious project at work for the past while, and that’s been taking up most of my time. Eventually I hope to be able to talk about the details of the project that I’m working on but since I’m going to be working on it again when I get home, for now I’ll just write another random post of thoughts that come to me on the train. So this post will be limited to what I can write up while on the train and then will get minimal editing after that. This way I can still post this week, but leave the time after I get home for getting back to work. Sorry in advance for mistakes.

One thing that obviously comes to mind while on the train is my commute on the train itself. I’ve written before about my dislike for cars in the past, but public transit also has its pros and cons. When taking transit my commute takes approximately an hour and a half each way. That’s only approximate because:

sometimes I just miss getting on the bus
sometimes the bus doesn’t show up
sometimes the bus gets stuck in traffic and takes a long time to get to the train
sometimes I miss the last bus home and have to walk 6 miles (3 miles if one other bus still comes that will take me half way) or take a cab
sometimes I just miss the connection getting off the train to the bus
sometimes the train breaks

When everything works perfectly it actually can be closer to about an hour and 20 minutes… But when multiple things fail it can take well over 2 hours.

This commute is pretty long but overall the portion spent on the train is the most comfortable (assuming I’m lucky enough to get a seat). I’d be ok with it if it were just the train I had to deal with. What I spend more time complaining about is the bus. Most of the issues listed above with the bus are a result of a few properties that are unique to the bus and aren’t an issue for the train:

the bus needs to deal with traffic and construction
the bus only comes every 15 minutes at peak times and goes down to hourly at non-peak times
the last bus on weekdays is ~21:20 and ~22:15 on weekends
there is only one bus that will drop me off within 3 miles of my house

Unfortunately I’m not really sure how reasonable it would be to change these. It seems like they could probably run buses later even if it was on an hourly frequency. That seems like a good idea anyway because it encourages people to take transit if they go out and may be returning impaired. If you ask me, having the last bus to an area be so early is just encouraging impaired driving. I don’t think running a few more buses a day on an hourly frequency would really cost the bus company that much and if they did so they may find that more people ride the bus during the day since they can actually rely on being able to get home. I don’t think however that they could probably justify running the bus more frequently until there are more riders. So that one’s kind of a catch-22.

So it seems like for now, I’ll probably just be stuck with crappy bus service.

It would, I think, be in translink’s interest to make the train a little more efficient though. One optimization that I think would make a lot of people’s commute shorter would be to apply different types of train like they do in Japan. In Japan many lines have local, semi-express, express, super-express and even more classes of train. They all run the same route it’s just that some have fewer stops. The idea here would be to have local trains that stop at each station and other trains that each stop only at main stations. That way you could get on the nearest local station and take it to the main station and switch there for an express or super-express train which wouldn’t stop much before getting you where you’re going. I’m guessing that the reason they don’t do that here has something to do with the fact that people here seem more easily confused. It probably also requires more switch points which I don’t think they have.

Anyway, at this point I’m just about at my train stop! So I better get off and see how close I make it to when my bus leaves. Wish me luck!

Congratulations SpaceX!

2010-12-09T00:00:00-08:00

So it turns out I didn’t do anything interesting since last week but SpaceX did!

I’ve been pretty excited about SpaceX for a couple years since I first heard about them. If you’re not aware, they’re a private space company started by Elon Musk in 2002. They are focused on creating low-cost commercial space launch vehicles and have created their launch vehicles with their very own design and manufacturing teams.

Anyway, the point of this post is that they just successfully became the first company to launch their own rockets, orbit the earth for a while at over 17,000 mph and land on target in the Pacific Ocean. A pretty amazing feat and something I’m pretty happy to see.

Even more awesome is that their test payload was… a wheel of cheese ! I wish they were a public company so I could invest my money with them. I would have done so a couple years ago too, but now I imagine they don’t need my money any more since they’ve got some pretty good contracts from NASA.

I am very hopeful that not only will SpaceX be successful, but that they will encourage some competition. Maybe we can have a new space race but this time with companies competing to do the most ambitious space-related stuff.

I think whichever company is the first to establish a permanent factory/research facility in earth orbit will very quickly be able to make the owner(s) very rich indeed. Pulling metals and other good stuff from asteroids in orbit and manufacturing things that take advantage of the lack of gravity and atmosphere should allow someone to create all sorts of cool stuff to sell back to the earthlings. I think it would also open up all sorts of other opportunities that haven’t even been thought up yet. I don’t know if SpaceX wants to be the company to do this or if they just want to facilitate it, but either way I’m pretty happy to see it happening.

Congratulations SpaceX on your success, and I hope you have lots more to come!

Running out of stuff.

2010-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

My last few posts have been pretty lame. I admit it. I’m not happy about that fact, but it seems like I’m going to continue being busy at work for a while. I’m also having trouble coming up with ideas for posts. In fact, I even resorted to looking at random wikipedia articles (click a few times and you might end up with great stuff such as this or this) hoping for some inspiration. That hasn’t given me any major inspiration yet either.

Speaking of randomness… I ran across a project this week that is offering random numbers as a service. I thought that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, If you’ve been following the scoreboard you’ll have noticed that after this post, I’ve got 4 more to do in order to have posted something here every week for a whole year. That seems pretty amazing to me. Especially considering how thoroughly everyone else seems to have failed. Given how hard it has been to figure out what to write about some weeks, I’m not sure if I’ll continue the weekly posting schedule in 2011. I guess that partially depends on feedback I get from my reader.

In order to try to come up with some ideas for what I should consider writing about if I do continue past Jan 1, I have been trying to look at the archive to see which posts stood out as having sucked less than the others. My thinking was to find what worked and try to do more of that. It seems to me like posts that worked better were:

posts about stuff I was working on (esp. Bob)
posts that were written while bad things were happening to me (eg. Beware of the middle elevator!)
posts about other things that I’ve done (eg. Hiding out in Japan)

posts that didn’t work as well include: most of the others.

What this tells me is that trying to force a post when I don’t have anything really interesting to write about seems to end up not turning out well. I guess that means I’m not that great of a writer. Maybe that’s a good reason to keep at it. Or maybe it just means I need to do more stuff that’s interesting to write about. In the meantime, along with my ideas and the year, this post is also running out. More next week!

Snow!

2010-11-25T00:00:00-08:00

Unlike last winter when there was a reason to want lots of snow and instead it was warm, it looks like this year will be a great one for skiers around Vancouver. For those who don’t like the cold, blame La Niña.

La Niña is the opposite of the famous El Niño which we had last year during the Olympics. With La Niña the temperatures are colder and there is a lot more precipitation (aka. snow). It has already been colder than -10°C here which is colder than normal. Last night and into today it snowed quite a bit, but with snow came warmer weather and by afternoon it turned to rain.

Some miscellaneous thing’s I’ve learned so far this winter:

Your furnace won’t heat your house if the hot surface ignitor is burnt out
Getting someone to come fix your hot surface ignitor is expensive
It’s great to have a neighbor who drives a snow plow
It’s hard to take good pictures of snow with bad light and an iPhone4 camera
Snow breaks everything, including the Internet
None of the “Global Warming” protesters are out when the temperatures is -5°C
When it’s really cold outside most bums aren’t out on the street asking for money (they’re probably at home watching their plasma TVs)

Anyway, it seems like we’ve at least passed the biting cold for now and are back into the normal sog. For a while there it was really starting to feel like we were in Canada!

My newest toy

2010-11-18T00:00:00-08:00

As mentioned two weeks ago I’ve been tempted to get a helicopter recently. Since I was a kid I’ve wanted a remote controlled helicopter. Last weekend I finally got one!

We made a trip down to Bellingham WA, to do some shopping. Shopping’s not really my thing, but I suppose it was worth going because Costco had this helicopter on sale for $34 which seemed like a pretty good deal. I saw a few other helicopters that day at the mall, but they were either quite a bit smaller or quite a bit more expensive, or both. At the time I thought I wanted one a bit bigger, but I didn’t really have a plan to buy anything. When I found a bigger one for only $34 though, it seemed like too good a deal to pass up.

When I was a kid, there were no cheap remote control helicopters. I looked at hobby catalogues but they were all way outside what my allowance could afford. It’s amazing to see the difference in toy technology from then to today. My uninformed hypothesis was that the reason I can now buy a working helicopter for $34 is a combination of several things:

shrinking electronics (both price and physical dimensions)
improved battery technology
cheap manufacturing in China

As usual, wikipedia has the answer. And I was partially correct. The piece I missed was about the coaxial rotors. These make helicopters much simpler, more stable and easier to fly. This however comes at a cost of forward speed.

Even if it’s a bit slow, this helicopter is really fun to fly. It seems to be fairly sturdy too and has survived some pretty hard crashes already.

Things I like about it:

cheap
relatively easy to control
charges via USB (takes ~20 mins to charge)
uses radio instead of infrared like some others I’ve seen

Things I’m less happy about:

battery life (lasts less than 4 minutes typically)
slower than I would have naively expected
too light to handle much wind

I think if I get another helicopter, I’d definitely consider getting one more advanced like perhaps one of these.

That said, one of the reasons I wanted to get a cheaper one was the possibility of hacking it. I did some tests and this one could lift a bit more weight, though I imagine I’d have to be pretty careful to keep it balanced. One of the things I considered was even trying to add an Ardweeny and a few more sensors and have it fly itself around. Maybe someday.

Cloud Computing

2010-11-11T00:00:00-08:00

Non-technical people often ask me what it is that I’m working on now and I have trouble explaining it. This is an attempt to give some insights into what I do, for people who don’t know much about Cloud Computing or much about the workings of computer software in general.

Working with computers can be a lot of fun. As a software engineer, I can build my own entire universe inside a computer and make it do whatever I want. Most of the software tools I use are freely available and I can always build my own tools that fit the job if what I’m trying to do isn’t easy with the existing tools. When things go wrong it’s always possible to fix so long as you have enough patience and are willing to track the problem down to the ultimate cause. Most of the time however is spent managing complexity. And sometimes getting everything exactly right is really, really hard. Like a conductor conducting an orchestra everything has to perform its part perfectly if you want the proper result.

When you’re working on building a software for a single computer, things are complicated enough but as soon as you start working on a software system that involves multiple computers, your problems compound. It often becomes necessary as programs and systems grow but when you move from 1 to 2 computers you now have 2 places things can go wrong. Plus, you are adding a network which introduces latency and twice as much hardware which doubles your chance of some sort of hardware failure. That’s even before you get to the fact that your own code needs to be much more complex to manage 2 computers coordinating with each other.

There’s a limit however on how much you can actually do with 2 computers. No matter how fast your 2 computers are, if what you’re trying to do gets too many connections or otherwise too big, you need to add more computers. Getting your own software working in a multi-computer environment is hard enough, but when you also need to deal with managing the physical hardware, the operating system, the network and all the other pieces it makes it even tougher. This is really where the concept of Cloud Computing comes in.

Cloud Computing, at least how I think of it, allows someone who wants to build or use a software system to focus on just writing and/or maintaining that software system with the actual networking, hardware, operating system and sometimes even support software managed by someone else. Each company offering “Cloud Services” defines their own platform which is a set of building blocks for you to use in order to run your own software. They differ mostly in what levels of the software stack they manage for you and how they let you manage your resources with their platform.

To give an example, if I were a making a new Internet game and I wanted to be able to put it out so people could start playing with it, I need to have at least one computer running my software connected to the Internet so that other people can access my game. Without Cloud Computing that would mean someone (usually me) would need to buy or rent a computer and install an operating system on it. Then the computer needs to be connected to the Internet which on the scale of one computer can be relatively costly. Once I’ve setup this computer and installed the operating system and support software for my game, configured the networking and the rest of the operating environment and installed and tested my game, I’d be ready to start having customers playing my game.

Notice how many things I need to do before I can get ready to have customers using my game? Also notice how many of these steps are not related to what I’m trying to do (just make a game)? There are more problems here too. I had to spend a lot of money up-front to get this game up before people could use it. I had to pay to rent or buy a computer, I had to pay an Internet provider to connect my computer to the Internet and possibly even pay an administrator to setup my computer the way I want it if I’m a developer who knows how to write software but doesn’t also know how to setup servers. So I needed to make a fairly substantial initial investment in this game before I even know how popular it would be.

It’s even worse if I expect it to become popular because then I need to guess how popular and probably pay to have several computers setup at the same time before I even launch my game because I don’t want it to crash or otherwise not be able to handle the load of all the people trying to play my game. I have to buy these up-front because buying computers is a process that can take quite a while and I also still need to set them up when I finally do get them.

Worse still is if I spent a lot of money and time setting up all these servers and getting everything ready and hardly anyone comes to play my game. At that point I’ve just wasted a lot of money and now I’m also possibly stuck owning a bunch of hardware that I don’t need and I need to sell at a big discount.

If I were to develop this same game but utilizing a Cloud Computing service, things would look quite a bit different. First of all I’d not need to spend time setting up my network or hardware. The cloud provider would take care of that for me. I’d also not need to (in most cases) install my own operating system. Instead what they would provide me with is access to a “virtual computer” (which as far as my game is concerned is a real computer) on which to install my software. Many providers also allow you to get these virtual computers preconfigured with different flavors of support software you might need for your application. It’s also possible with many providers to pay only for the amount of resources you actually use.

Paying only for what I use, combined with the fact that what I’m paying for can be setup usually in minutes often just seconds, means that I can start with just one virtual computer running my game. If I notice that it is getting popular, I can setup additional virtual computers within minutes and without needing to actually purchase the hardware or setup the operating system or anything else. I just need to create a new virtual machine and run my software on it. This takes away a lot of the non-development work and allows me to focus on making my game better. It also means that if my game is not a success, all that I’ve paid for is the one virtual computer which I can now shut down. If it is successful, I can scale from 1 computer to 10 or even 100 all from my laptop.

Anyway, having said all that, what I’m working on now and what Joyent offers is the sort of cloud computing infrastructure that allows people to create these virtual computers. I’m basically building and improving the systems that allow all of these virtual computers to run and the tools for managing them. We’re also working on adding features which make it so that you can do even more things with these virtual computers than you could do with a physical computer, since we can write software that has a lot more visibility into the characteristics of your virtual computers than could be done with physical computers and our software knows about the network and other bits as well.

This post turned out to be a lot longer than I planned, but I hope it explains a little more what cloud computing is and what it is that I’m working on every day.

More robots

2010-11-04T00:00:00-07:00

In my last robot post, I talked a bit about my next robot and asked for ideas. Nobody sent me any ideas and it’s been almost 2 months! I guess that means either:

Nobody has better ideas than me
My burgeoning robot army scares people
Nobody reads this blog

whatever the case may be, I’m just going to have to continue this project without further outside input.

This past week one of my coworkers had a remote controlled helicopter in the office and that reminded me that I really need to get back to work on something. A helicopter is tempting, but we’ll see. For now, what I’ve decided to do is just order some servos and a servo controller from Pololu. This will allow me to get started on some prototyping. I am also going to be ordering some more sensors and a new microcontroller board, but I haven’t decided which ones to order yet. I’ll probably spend some more time deciding that after writing this post.

The two most time consuming tasks by far while building Bob were:

building the mechanical components (ie. frame)
soldering together the enormous tangle of wires + components
dealing with the fact that I didn’t have enough pins

This time I’m hoping to improve on that a little by:

doing less complicated work on the frame (and not using a hacksaw and hand file)
etching some boards instead of green-wiring
using a more powerful controller so I can write more software and fight less with hardware

Basically I’m going to try where possible to work smarter instead of harder. I’ll see how that goes. I imagine I’ll get a little better with each robot I build and won’t really be considered good at it for quite a while.

Anyway, that’s my quick update. Hopefully I can make another update soon with some pictures of my parts and maybe even some more ideas based on initial prototyping.

Based on a true story

2010-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

Note: this is based on a true story insofar as I did come home from work today. Actually I came home from work twice today, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, I was walking to the skytrain from my office (not that far at all) and I saw something weird out of the corner of my eye. The ground suddenly looked warped as though I were looking through some sort of lens, then just as quickly went back to normal. Unsure if I had actually seen something or whether I was just hallucinating due to lack of sleep, I ignored it and continued on my way.

As usual the train that comes 33% of the time – the only one I can take – was the first to arrive at the platform. It gorged itself on the crowd of people who could actually take it somewhere and disappeared down the tunnel. Strangely though the sound suddenly cut off as it rounded the corner out of sight. It didn’t get quieter gradually, the sound just suddenly disappeared. I looked around at my fellow platform waiters and nobody else seemed to have noticed that anything was amiss. So, I stood there waiting and minded my own business.

Finally my train arrived and I scrambled on quickly, trying to get a seat, preferably one where my knees didn’t touch the seat in front of me. I won that race and got a seat but then noticed that nobody else was getting on the train. In fact it didn’t seem like there was anybody on the train at all.

“That’s awfully weird” I thought. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the train so empty, even at 1:00 in the morning there are always some other people on the train. Why would I be the only one? And what happened to all the other people who were waiting on the platform? Did I somehow get on the wrong train? Was somebody playing some sort of practical joke on me?

Starting to get concerned, I stood up and began walking back down the train to see if maybe there was anybody at all on the train. Surely I couldn’t be the only one! The doors had closed and the train was cruising right along at this point. It was also at this point I noticed something else that was strange. The tunnel walls outside the train windows seemed to be a single unbroken piece of concrete. There were no seams and not much at all for my eyes to focus on. And the train was moving fast. Faster than I remember it going and we should definitely have made it to the next station by now.

What could I do? Had they really managed to change the track and the route all while I was at work? Was I really just asleep and having a dream? Nothing seemed to make sense. Especially when combined with the ground going wavy and the disappearance of the previous train.

So I sat down in a seat to consider my options.

How long had I been on the train now? It must be at least 2 minutes. I took out my phone and started a timer. I was watching the numbers totally confused. The seconds were not the same length! The numbers were incrementing, 12..13…..14..15…16. How is that possible? I tried counting in my head. “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand”… I counted to 5 before one second passed on the timer. The next second I only counted to 2. I was definitely counting a constant speed. Or at least more constant than that.

This was no good at all.

It was at this time I noticed that the train seemed to be going even faster now, but the tunnel walls looked exactly the same. Then the lights in the train went off.

There was still light coming in from the tunnel lights outside the train, but my eyes were not yet adjusted and I couldn’t see much.

That was when I finally started to panic.

I pressed on the yellow emergency button, thinking that it was worth a try. Rather than (or possibly along with, I’ll never know) triggering the silent alarm it gave me a painful electric shock. It was at this point when I knew I was in trouble.

to be continued… (maybe)

Dentistry

2010-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

I finally went to the dentist on Monday after not going for about a year and a half. I hadn’t gone for so long because I didn’t have coverage for a while and didn’t want to pay and even now that I’ve got coverage again, I’ve been really busy. Not that it’s really hard to come up with excuses not to go to the dentist…

So anyway, I went to the dentist and did the usual routine where they took some x-rays, told me that I need to floss more and poked at my teeth and gums with their metal tools trying to get them to bleed. Then they ground away at my teeth with their little tooth sander that seemed like it was probably going to slip loose at any moment and rip my teeth right out. The sander also has the wonderful habit of leaving bits of its sand wedged between my teeth. I survived the lecture, the poking and the sanding and thought I’d just have to deal with the fluoride and I’d be all set for the next 6 months. Unfortunately, they had another surprise waiting for me.

When the dentist came in to look at my X-rays and poke around in my mouth he said something to the effect: “Oh, there’s a cavity”. I thought “oh, great… That means I have to come back.” Then he said “that one too”, and I knew I was in trouble because he wasn’t done yet. In all, I apparently have 4 cavities. Three of them are surrounding previous fillings, so I’m guessing whichever dentist did those fillings didn’t seal in them up tight enough and those cavities escaped then invited a friend over to their party.

So tomorrow I get to go back to the dentist for a 1 hour and 40 minute appointment where he’s apparently going to fix me all up. At least for now.

If you ask me, we’re long overdue for some of the new technology like this gel that regenerates teeth or this plasma tooth cleaner or even these tooth seeds. But I’m pretty sure the dentist union is working hard to ensure these are not available anytime soon.

Oh, well. If I survive I’ll write a new post next week!

41st Post!

2010-10-14T00:00:00-07:00

This is my 41st blog post!

Both Howie and Kevin are doing beyond pathetically (each have 1 post in the past 15 weeks) in the Project 52 challenge. Not that the Project 52 people aren’t doing even worse. But, just because everyone else fails, doesn’t mean I should quit. That’s not my style.

I do appreciate Kevin challenging me though since that got me started writing which hopefully will someday allow me to get better at it. Or encourage me to do something interesting, so I can blog about it. Thanks Kevin!

It does mean however that when I’ve been really busy at work, you’ll get a lame post like this. Just a disjointed set of updates. Sorry. I’m glad you’re reading this anyway though. Thanks loyal readers!

I did update my book list again since I finished the “The Other Lands”. It was really good, but now I’m stuck with the same problem I wrote about last week where I’m 2 books into a trilogy where I can’t read the 3rd book for a while. I blame my brother for getting me the first book for Christmas last year. Thanks Jon! Anyway, I just realized I finished 17 novels so far in 2010. I should be able to make it to at least 20 for the year. Thanks really long commute!

Um….

This past weekend I took my wonderful wife to Las Vegas for our anniversary. Thanks Kaz for putting up with me this long! We had a good time going to see “O” and generally taking in some of the many things there are to do in Vegas. While we were we went to one of the famous Vegas buffets. The best part of a buffet is that you can have a plate of bacon covered in cheese if you want. Thanks bacon for being so tasty!

If I sound pretty thankful this week, it’s probably because it was Thanksgiving this week and I have a lot for which to be thankful.

So anyway, seems like I’m running out of time before the deadline for this post to count for this week. Hopefully next week’s post will be somewhat more coherent. Maybe it will even include the answer to life the universe and everything.

Ideas from The Commonwealth Universe

2010-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

I finished reading “The Evolutionary Void” by Peter F. Hamilton last week. That’s the 3rd book in “The Void Trilogy” and the 5th book I’ve read that takes place in his Commonwealth Universe. These books have a lot of interesting stuff going on so I thought I’d write a quick summary of some cool things they contain. WARNING: This may contain some spoilers, but I’ll try not to give too much of the story away. I’m just going to list some of the cool technology.

First off, don’t get anywhere near the end of Pandora’s Star without having a copy of Judas Unchained handy. Similarly, don’t get near the end either of the first two books in The Void Trilogy without having the next ready. One thing about these books is that I really don’t think they stand alone very well. The story really doesn’t finish and this is really just 2 books split into 5 volumes if you ask me.

With that out of the way, let me say something about what interests me in SciFi in general. If you look at my books page you’ll see I’ve got a lot of SciFi on there. One of the things I like most about SciFi is all the really cool concepts that good SciFi writers come up with. Placing characters alternate universes surrounded by amazing things often leads to really interesting stories which focus on the relationship with technology and societal issues that result. In the 5 books I read that happen in this universe, there were (off the top of my head):

planet sized AIs
artificial wormholes
artificial black holes
FTL starships
weapons capable of destroying stars
personal force fields
engineering projects on a interstellar scale
inter-planetary government spanning hundreds of light-years
memory stores (and ability to copy memories to a new body)
bionic enhancements
“distributed humans” with multiple bodies
alien races millions of years old
“post-physical” beings

and lots of other cool tech that I’m not even thinking of right now.

Being a geek and spending a lot of time thinking about technology and the future, I’m always interested in having more ideas to play with. While these ideas might seem pretty far-fetched right now, (part of what makes them exciting!) it is important to remember that the idea of going to space at all was once crazy. Now we have people in space all the time and “private companies working on spaceflight”. Phones today have more power than computers did even 10 years ago with much smaller footprints. The human genome has mostly been mapped. And there are advances happening all over the place. It’s an exciting time to live in and the future has potential to be pretty cool too. As long as the use of these technologies for evil stays a plot device.

Netflix

2010-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

Wow, it seems like it was just yesterday I was writing last week’s post about paradoxes, and already it’s time to write a post again! Time sure flies when you’re busy having fun! This week will be another short post, since nothing as exciting as getting stuck in the elevator happened again.

Netflix is finally available in Canada! I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while and was pretty excited to try it out. In case you’re not familiar with it, Netflix has a service in the US (since 1999) where you can subscribe with a monthly fee and they will send you DVDs in the mail. You can keep the movies as long as you want and then mail them back in a prepaid envelope. Once you mail the movies back, they’ll send you the next one on your wishlist/queue. They have a huge library of DVDs with more than 100,000 movies as of 2009. More recently (since 2007) they have been offering streaming of movies over the Internet, though the selection of movies you can stream over the Internet is much smaller than their DVD collection.

Until last week Netflix was unavailable in Canada. Last week I finally got an email from them that they were launching their service in Canada. Finally I could try it out!

In Canada Netflix is not doing DVDs. The only option is streaming videos over the Internet. I believe the selection of movies available for streaming in Canada is also more limited than that available for streaming to the US, but I can’t confirm since I don’t have an account with the US version.

Right now they have a promotion where the first 30 days are free. So you can sign up and start watching movies right now and not have to pay anything. You can stream movies to your web browser, PS3, Wii, Xbox360, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. You can also apparently watch Netflix movies on the new Apple TV. After the first 30 days, the service is $7.99 which doesn’t seem too bad considering that you can watch unlimited movies from their collection.

The first thing I did when I signed up was search for a bunch of movies I like in order to see what sort of selection they had. Most of the movies I searched for were not available, but they do have a lot of good movies. One thing that Netflix seems to do really well is recommendations. You can rate movies you’ve watched (even if they’re not available) and Netflix uses that information to help find you movies they do have that they think you’d like. After I rated some movies it seemed to do a pretty good job of coming up with other movies that actually do sound pretty interesting to me. Apparently the more movies you rate, the better it gets too.

The biggest concern I had before trying it out was whether the quality would be very good. It turns out that it is a lot better than most other Internet video. While quality can depend a lot on available bandwidth, the couple movies I tried out were definitely watchable. A couple of them were actually really good.

Since I’ve only been trying it out for a couple days so far, I can’t say it’s the best thing ever yet, but so far my experience has been pretty good. And it’s probably worth at least $7.99/month. I recommend that you try it out if you haven’t already!

Paradoxes

2010-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

At lunch today one of my coworkers said something that reminded me of one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Specifically the “dichotomy paradox”. Basically the thinking here is that it should not be possible to get to anywhere, because to get somewhere requires that you first get halfway there. Then, to get from the halfway point to the destination you must again go past the halfway point between this new location and the destination. Every time you make it halfway, you must still make it past the halfway point between your new location and the destination. Since each of these distances must be finite and there are an infinite number of them you must cross before getting to your destination, you can never get there. However, since people get places all the time, this is a paradox.

I’ve been busy with work lately and I haven’t had much time to think about what to blog about. And I’ve not been stuck in any elevators recently, so I don’t have any exciting stories to tell. So I decided I’d write a short post on paradoxes. I suppose that’s better than writing nothing at all.

Here’s a sampling of some other interesting paradoxes to check out if you’re not familiar with them:

The birthday paradox — which counter-intuitively proves that if you have 57 people in a room there’s a 99% chance two of them have the same birthday.
Opposite Day — which is obviously not.
The Liar Paradox — this does not exist.
The Ship of Theseus — which raises the metaphysical question of what piece of the boat determines its identity.
The Friendship Paradox — which helps out Facebook.
The Voting Paradox — which explains why democracy sometimes doesn’t work.

If you read through those and are looking for more, Wikipedia’s even got a whole page listing paradoxes.

That’s it for today. Hopefully reading all those links will keep you busy until next week. And hopefully next week I’ll come up with something even more exciting to write about.

My next robot

2010-09-16T00:00:00-07:00

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been really busy with work. Because of that, I’ve not spent as much time thinking about my next robot as I would have liked. That doesn’t mean I’ve completely given up on it though! Bob needs some company!

I’ve pretty much decided that my next robot will have legs. While you might be thinking 2 legs, I’m thinking that’s just not enough. For a couple reasons, I think that having more legs will be better. It will be easier to balance for one. Having 2 legs means you’ve only got one on the surface when you’re walking. That means lots of tricky balance. With 6, I can have the robot walk while always keeping 3 on the ground which should keep it pretty stable.

Plus, 6 legs looks way cool!

One big disadvantage to more legs is cost. For each leg of the robot, I’m going to need 3 servos to get the range of motion that I want. Basically two servos move the “hip” joint, forward, back, in and out and the other servo acts like a “knee”. Its walking motion would probably be something like a spider or an ant. The picture at the top of this post should give you some idea of what I’m talking about (click on the image to go to the site of the person who created that one, inc. video). With 3 servos per leg though I’ll need a whopping 18 servos just to move the 6 legs. That’s going to get pretty expensive. Even before building any controls.

I think what I’m going to do in order to get started is order 6 servos and the controller board I want to use this time (from Pololu). Once I get those I can start doing some initial testing and get an idea for how I’m going to construct this thing. I should also be able to begin some initial tests with the servo controls. I’ll post another update once I’ve actually got something more to say about this project.

If you have any ideas or suggestions that you think might inspire me, please email them to josh@wilsdon.ca with the subject “Robot Ideas”.

The future of jobs.

2010-09-09T00:00:00-07:00

Recently a subject that has come up in conversation a lot is jobs. This is for a number of reasons. One is the depressing US unemployment numbers, and a lot of people saying that the real jobless rate is much higher than the official government rate. Another thing that often brings the discussion to jobs is any discussion of computers and robots in the future.

On the first point, it’s pretty clear that many of the jobs that have been lost in the recent economic downturn will not be coming back. The auto industry, along with many other industries where people are doing a lot of manual labour seem to already be spending too much on labour if they want to compete globally. Elsewhere, lower human wages and more automation allow companies to produce goods cheaper and when automation is involved, often with higher quality. This leads handily into my next point.

Automation in the form of both computers and robots allows companies to run manufacturing and many service operations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without variation in the quality of work. Or sick days. The technology that makes this possible is improving all the time and the costs are coming down. As time passes, I think people are also getting more and more comfortable with the idea of dealing with machines instead of people. Many people now use ATMs instead of talking to their bank teller, and shop online without talking to a human in the whole process. This is something that would have been really hard for people to accept not that long ago.

In both of these cases, I don’t see a clear path for those people displaced to ever get their old jobs back. If car companies switch to robots to put the frames together for their cars, it’s hard to imagine the people whose primary skill is welding car bodies together are all going to be able to get a new job welding car bodies. Most of them are likely going to need to do something at least slightly different. It’s the people who are unable to learn new skills that are going to have the hardest time.

A whole other post can (and may sometime) be written about whether there will be enough jobs at all for these people, even if they are willing to re-train, but I’ll leave that out of this discussion for now. Instead I want to end this post with a bit of optimism.

Having kids, I am extra concerned about the state of the future job market. I really hope that my kids will be able to have a fulfilling job through which they are also able to support themselves. In thinking about this, my opinion on how best to train them for that future is to ensure that they’re good learners. If they are able to learn new things quickly and not get too attached to one way of doing things.

I think this is something that people who deal with computers are already used to. That is because in the world of technology, things are always changing. Computers today are enormously faster and can store way more data than computers even 5-10 years ago. Programming for machines with many processors requires building things differently than when machines used to have only one processor. Even 5 years ago, there weren’t many people writing apps for cell phones, now there’s a booming industry around that. Not to mention the changes in the way many things are being done due to the cloud. My opinion is that people who are the best at working with computers are the people who are able to constantly adapt and are always willing to learn new things. I think in the future this same property is going to spread to many other industries as well because they will be depending on technology and a global market that are both changing very rapidly.

So what is my recommendation for people who want to be employed in the future? Get good at learning new skills! People who are unable to, or won’t adapt are the people who are going to have the hardest time finding jobs.

15 years of Linux

2010-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been spending more time learning Solaris, and I’ve been using OS X as my primary interface to the world of bits for about a year and a half. For some reason though my thoughts recently went to Linux. I’m still using Linux lots of places. It is installed on my HTPC machine hooked up behind my TV, and in several servers both at work and out on the Internet. I also realized that I’ve now been using Linux for over 15 years, so I figured that it deserved a blog post.

Thinking about my history with Linux reminded me that I still have the first set of Linux CDs I bought. The CDs themselves are from December 1994, but I got them sometime in early 1995. These CD’s include such gems as Linux Kernel 1.1.72, Slackware 2.1, SLS 1.06 and Debian 0.91 Beta. Along with DOOM and a complete archive of several of the main Linux sites. Today, I made a backup copy of these CDs so that I can create a VM running old versions of Linux when I’m feeling nostalgic. Anyway, here’s a scan of the back of the CD set case:

Looking through the 30 page guide that came with it is pretty interesting. The minimum setup is listed as 386SX with 4MB of RAM and at least a 10MB hard drive. Yes. Megabytes! The recommended system is 486 with 16MB of RAM and 80MB of hard disk. It also supports Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA and Super VGA video cards. I remember that the first machine I installed it on had a CGA monitor and I thought it was awesome. This was well before Google existed and even the web was pretty fresh.

Since my first Slackware install, I’ve managed to use Linux most of the time. I have also tried out OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD at various times but eventually came back to Linux. I used Linux as my main desktop through university even though Windows was getting popular. I tried Windows 95 and I think probably 98, but I always came back to Linux because it seemed so much more powerful. I’m pretty sure I was the only one at my university writing philosophy papers with Vim. Since University I’ve been using it for work. At my previous jobs I used Linux exclusively, though I gave up on Slackware many years ago now and have been using Debian/Ubuntu ever since.

Most recently, I’ve been using OS X instead of Linux as a desktop OS. It’s pretty familiar though since I can still pull up a command line and run the many of the tools I’m used to. Plus I spend a lot of time working on machines remotely over SSH anyway. The system I’m getting really unfamiliar with is Windows. Since Windows keeps changing and I keep not using it, I’m becoming pretty much useless when I get put in front of a Windows machine. The only things that I can use comfortably on Windows are Cygwin or MinGW.

So that’s my quick trip down memory lane. I’m not sure if I’ll still be using Linux as much in the future. It could be I’ll be using more Solaris, or possibly even something else UNIX-like. I’m sure I’ll keep using Linux somewhere though.

Kevin Lost!

2010-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

If you’re reading this, my blog has been successfully moved to a Joyent Smart Machine. I mentioned this move was coming in my post last week.

This, my first post exclusively on the new site, will be just a bunch of updates.

First: Project 52. If you’ve been following the scoreboard carefully, you might have noticed something that happened recently. It is no longer possible for either Howie or Kevin to out-blog me this year. Even if this were my last post and they posted every week for the rest of the year, it wouldn’t be enough. They both lost! Does that mean I’m going to give up? Probably not. That’s not my style.

Second: Joyent. I just wanted to give an update now that I’ve been working at Joyent a couple months. So far it has been awesome. The people at Joyent are awesome and we’re working on awesome stuff. It looks like I’ll be moving down the stack for the next little while and possibly even getting into some kernel development, so that’s pretty cool. I’m also learning a lot of stuff about Solaris/OpenSolaris. It’s an interesting time to be getting into Solaris given what’s been going on.

Third: Robots. Stay tuned for some updates in the coming weeks about some plans for my next robot. Bob needs some friends!

Fourth: Zombies. I haven’t seen any all week. I did see a herd of mountain goats, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t zombie mountain goats.

Finally: Elevators. I haven’t been stuck in one for 2 whole weeks!

Moving again!

2010-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

Before I get around to the main topic of this post I wanted to post a small update to my story from last week about being stuck in an elevator. The building manager did come by when I was next in the office and told me that he was sorry I had been stuck in the elevator so long. He also told me that the reason it had failed was due to a relay that had “blown out” and needed to be replaced. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better. Maybe they should do maintenance on those elevators a little more often?

Anyway, the primary topic for this week is this blog itself. I’ve been using Heroku now for a while. It actually has worked out pretty well. There have been a few Heroku outages since I set this up, but I’ve not personally seen any issues with the blog. There are several features of Heroku that I really like too, and they’ve really done well, such as the lack of administration and the theoretical scaling (I can’t vouch for the scaling because this blog is not really all that popular.) Ordinarily I think I would just leave well enough alone. Since I do work for Joyent now though and Heroku is technically a competitor, I thought it would be a good idea to try out the old dog food and see if I can get this moved over to a Joyent Smart Machine.

So far I have made some good progress. I’ve got a Smart Machine set up and I already set it up for Nginx and git-push based deploy so I can deploy my blog there just as easily as Heroku. This page was pretty helpful in setting up the git deploy, though I did a couple things differently.

There are a few things I still need to do in order to be comfortable switching the DNS to the new server. The biggest of these is getting the nginx config just right. I want to get the config setup as well so that I can start testing some other new technologies including node.js written by Joyent employee Ryan Dahl without necessarily breaking my blog. I want to try to set it up to be as maintenance-free as possible.

Anyway, this post is mostly just a heads-up to let you know what I’m up to. Hopefully next week or the week after I’ll be all done with the transition and you’ll be impressed.

UPDATE: I got the nginx config fixed, and my deploy script is now deploying to both Heroku and Joyent. I plan to switch the DNS over sometime in the next couple days!

Beware of the middle elevator!

2010-08-09T00:00:00-07:00

On my way home today I had quite an adventure. This was mostly written as-it-happens and only a bit of cleanup was done after the fact. It was written mostly on my phone after all.

I worked late today as I have been recently since we’ve got lots of awesome that customers really want and I have to help get it to them before the anticipation kills them. Anyway, I was leaving the office with what I thought was plenty of time to get on the train and make it on the last bus that would take me home (last bus is just after 9pm, ridiculous but not the focus of this post). Unfortunately for me, the elevators had their own plans.

I got to the elevator (my office is on the 6th floor) and pressed the button but no elevator came. After about 5 minutes of waiting, with no elevator coming, I decided I should just take the stairs and went over toward them. Just as I opened the door to the stairs and realized that the stairs lock from the inside and I wasn’t sure whether I could get off on the main floor, the elevator came.

So, as fate would have it, I got in and pushed the handy “M” button and waited. Then suddenly there was a strange sound and a sudden jolt. It felt like the elevator had fallen a ways before stopping. The jolt of the stop felt just like it does when you’re walking down the stairs in the dark and miss a stair. A small jolt went up my spine but so far I think I’m ok.

Anyway, I tried pressing the door open button but nothing happened. I opened the panel that I thought had some emergency phone in it, but all it has in it was graffiti. I pressed the emergency button, but that only seemed to ring the bell.

After a few minutes someone came and started talking to me through the door. I couldn’t hear much of what he said because there’s a really loud air conditioner in here going full blast. He came a short while later and I pressed my ear against the door but I still couldn’t make out everything he was saying. I did hear him say that the repairman was supposed to be here in 10 or 15 minutes. I think.

In any case, that’s where I am right now. Typing this in on my phone to pass the time while I wait… I guess I’ll write more when something happens. I tried calling Kevin to brag, but he’s such a failer he didn’t even answer.

It’s been about 10-15 minutes now. I hear some kind of sound going on that could be someone trying to fix this. Or it could be the elevator breaking more. Or zombies. Who knows?

I’m kind of hoping someone calls me while I’m in here. Just so I can say “I’m just hanging out. You know… In an elevator.” But people usually don’t call on the rare occasions that I have something interesting to say.

Waiting…

Still waiting…

One of the noises stopped. Not sure if that’s good.

Oh! Now a voice is telling me the repair guy is here. So it should just be “another minute or two”. Well, he won’t make it in one, since it took me longer than that to type this paragraph. I’m not so fast at typing on my phone.

Woohoo! Freedom!

Some really big elevator repair guy finally came and opened the door. The elevator car was a foot and a bit below the main floor. So I had to step up to main. Like you’d imagine if the elevator was stuck partway between floors.

Two security guys were there to greet and apologize to me. They were apparently watching me the whole time (kinda creepy?) and said “whoa you were in there a long time, we were surprised you didn’t sit down.”. Well dear reader, I could have sat down but I hope you appreciate that I was too focused on bringing you this “amazing” story to think of such a thing.

Altogether, I think I was in the elevator for just over 45 minutes. The whole incident including waiting extra for the elevator initially and telling my story to the security guys and the elevator guy, probably delayed me about an hour.

Now I’m on the train and it’s behaving funny. Maybe I should get out and walk?

I’m pretty sure that I managed to miss the last bus. Oh well. Exercise is supposed to be good.

UPDATE 1: Kevin finally called me back. But too late. I was already on the train. Telling someone on the phone that you were stuck in an elevator is not as cool as being able to tell them that I am stuck in an elevator.

UPDATE 2: Yep definitely missed my bus. I’m on another bus that’ll take me half way. Then I get to walk!

UPDATE 3: It took me 54 minutes to walk home from where I got off the bus. I’m home now though, and trying to decide whether I should take the stairs until I find out why the elevator failed (I’ve got someone’s card and they’re supposed to tell me).

Hiding out in Japan

2010-08-04T00:00:00-07:00

Part of the reason I had sporadic access to the Internet last week is that I was travelling around Japan. It’s kind of awkward to be in Japan where you can get fast Internet everywhere, but have sucky Internet. The biggest issue I think is that I didn’t plan ahead enough. Next time I go I think I’ll just get a WiMAX dongle and use that since it seems to be available everywhere now. But hearing about my problems accessing the Internet is probably not as exciting as just looking at some pictures from Japan, so I’ll post a few selected pictures here of some stuff I saw this trip.

First, Kyoto. My favourite place to go in Japan…

This is Kiyomizu-dera which is one of my favourite temples and has a good view over Kyoto. It’s also got some tasty “holy” water.

This is Kinkakuji. The golden pavilion. It’s pretty popular with tourists and looks pretty spectacular, but something about it doesn’t impress me as much as many of the other places in Kyoto.

Other places I went in Kyoto included:

A boat down the Hozugawa river
Nanzenji
Nijojo
Ryoanji
Sanjuusangendou
The emergency room (I’ll save this story for another time – everybody’s ok)

On the way back from Kyoto we made a quick stop in Nara…

This is Toudaiji. The largest wooden building in the world with the world’s largest bronze Buddha in it. It’s pretty impressive in person. But watch out for the deer. They’ll attack you and steal stuff out of your pockets.

Then Tokyo…

The English brochure on the boat said this is the “Golden Turd”. It was made by a famous French dude for the Asahi beer hall it sits on.

From Odaiba you can see The Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo Tower and the Statue of Liberty.

This picture looks out from a train station toward Ginza. We didn’t go to Ginza this trip though.

Other places I went in Tokyo include:

Asakusa
A boat from Asakusa to Odaiba
Shinjuku (including the world’s busiest train station)
Shibuya
Akihabara (twice, once way too early and once again when stuff was open)
Harajuku (crowded even on an early Thursday afternoon)
Meijijingu

Finally other miscellaneous stuff…

This shows some walls made of reused pottery pieces along the Tokoname Pottery Path.

If I liked Octopus, eating on this island would have been great. At least other people enjoyed it.

Notes:

I’m sure I’m forgetting places I went since I just wrote this up from memory. I’ll either update it when I remember something or maybe post more pictures/info later.
None of these photos were taken by me. My brother and my wife get credit for all the pictures I have from the trip.

That’s all for now! Time to try to adjust my brain back to this time zone.

Where'd the Internet go?

2010-07-27T00:00:00-07:00

For reason’s I’ll explain next week, I’ve had really spotty access to the Internet most of the past week. I have been able to connect about 10% of the times I’ve tried, and even then it’s not worked very well (unless you count 50+% packet loss as working well). Right now it seems to be working somewhat, so I’m going to try to write up this quick post before it stops working again.

Anyway, what I was going to write about is how much it sucks when you can’t get on the Internet. I’ve realized just how dependent I’ve become on using the Internet to do such things as:

check the weather forecast
lookup some information about some thing or place
find directions
compare products before buying
stay in touch with friends and co-workers

It’s possible to do all of these things without the Internet, (people survived quite a while to get us here) but now that we’ve got it, it’s really hard to go back. There’s just so much information available online trying to compare products by reading the boxes in a store just really seems frustrating.

In the future, I imagine Internet access will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to get offline. Until then I guess I’ll just have to look at some options to make sure that I always have Internet access wherever I go, if I need it. I’ll let you know how that goes — assuming that my Internet connection works.

Programming Languages

2010-07-21T00:00:00-07:00

I figured this would be a good time to talk about the programming languages I’ve used, am using and will use in the near future.

I recently overheard Kevin telling someone: “You’re old, you must be what? 30?”. I’m sure to him I’m ancient. Never does that feel more true than around my birthday.

Birthdays seem like a reasonable time for reflection so I’ve decided this time around I’ll reflect here on the programming languages I’ve used and the programming languages I’ve been using recently at work and the programming languages I’m interested in spending more time with soon.

I think the first program I wrote was on a TI-99A/4A. My dad got one and I thought it was amazing. You could hook this machine up to your TV and write programs that actually made the computer do stuff. I’m pretty sure my first program looked something like:

10 PRINT "JOSH IS AWESOME"
20 GOTO 10

after that, I was hooked.

I remember spending some time playing with BASIC, but I think most of what I was doing until Jr. High was just messing around. It was around that point I started using BBSes and learning C (on my own) and Pascal (in school). These two languages let me do way more complicated stuff than what I could do with BASIC. It was around this time (1994/1995) that I also started using Linux and BSD. It was also around this time that I started using the Internet via a shell account at CyberPort Montana. It was awesome!

Since then I’ve used C on and off (on as my primary language for quite a few years, then off more at Layerboom) and Linux or other UNIX-like OSes almost exclusively. Before working at Layerboom, I think I spent time working in (roughly from most amount of time spent to least):

C
PHP
Perl
Bash
Python
TI-BASIC
BASIC
C++
Assembly
ColdFusion

and probably a few others that I spent a little bit of time with.

Since I started at Layerboom, I have been coding almost exclusively in Ruby. I have spent a little bit of time using Bash or C, or reading through someone’s Perl, but it was mostly Ruby. Sometime I’ll write another whole post about my experience with Ruby.

As you can tell from the fact that the Smart platform’s written in it, Joyent’s big into Javascript among other things. So, for the foreseeable future, while it seems like I’ll probably continue to be spending the majority of my time using Ruby, I think I’ll also need to start using Javascript as well. Specifically, what I’m interested in getting started with is server-side Javascript using Node.js. As such, I’m going to try to spend some time over the next while getting myself up to speed on Javascript and Node. I hope to post more in the future regarding my progress!

Joyent!

2010-07-14T00:00:00-07:00

For the past year and a bit I’ve been working with an awesome team on awesome stuff at Layerboom. It’s been a lot of work but I’m proud of what we managed to build, and proud of our team. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks both our team and the stuff we’ve made is awesome because Joyent decided to buy Layerboom. This means I’m officially a “Joyeur” now. We have joined the Joyent team and will continue to build awesome stuff.

The people I’ve met from Joyent so far are also awesome. That means that surely the stuff we’ll produce together will be extremely awesome. You might think I’m exaggerating. I mean, how many times can I use the word awesome in a post? In reality though, it’s pretty amazing. I’m really excited about what we will be able to build along side and on top of what both companies have already built. Keep watching, I’ll be awesome.

I can’t really go into any more detail than what’s already been stated elsewhere, so this post will be shorter than usual. This is exciting enough though, that I couldn’t not write about it!

The Future

2010-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

It seems like many people’s vision of the future has included flying cars for some time now. For some reason though it seems flying cars are still not that close to reality. The problem, I think, is not with the technology but rather with people. There are several companies working on flying cars and in fact there are working vehicles. Getting these released to the public and in widespread use seems like a disaster waiting to happen. At least until people aren’t allowed to drive them. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll already know what I think about cars, and I think that people can be trusted even less to drive flying cars. Unless they’re Korben Dallas.

I’ve been thinking about this recently due to the giant oil spill that seems to have been caused by a combination of incompetence, corner-cutting and operating near (or beyond) the limits of current human capability.

I think in general, the future seems full of things that could be very powerful but also potentially dangerous for people to be involved with. Beyond flying cars, these include (off the top of my head):

Genetic Manipulation (bio-weapons: on purpose or accidental)
Life extension (you think it’s crowded now?)
Attempts to correct climate change
Nanotech (think Grey goo)
Commercialized Space (oops, dropped asteroids on NYC)
Surveillance everywhere (1984!)
DRM / Intellectual Property (you can’t think that!)

I could go on, but the point I’m trying to make is that the thing all of these technologies have in common is that they’re generally things that are considered by someone to be a good idea, but each of them has potential to cause a lot of problems. I can personally see good reasons to pursue almost all of these (except the last one). I even think work on most of them will lead to really good things. I’m just worried because I see so many people running things who seem to be criminally incompetent.

Maybe I tend to have too little faith in humanity.

Maybe others have too much.

Either way, I expect the future will be interesting!

Happy Canada Day!

2010-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Happy Canada Day!

I hope everyone is enjoying doing Canadian things like eating poutine, playing hockey, watching or listening to the CBC and going to Tim Hortons.

This post is my 26th this year. That means we’re now exactly halfway through the project 52 challenge, so I figured it’s about time to post an update on the progress so far. It’s been tough some weeks to come up with either ideas or time to write something, but I’ve found a way to get it done.

In case you haven’t checked the scoreboard recently, the current status at the time of this post going live (Howie and Kevin still have a few more hours to make a post this week) is:

	Kevin	Howie	Josh
Pass	10	14	26
Fail	16	12	0
Weeks	26	26	26
% Pass	38%	54%	100%

As you can see, after challenging Howie and I to do this, Kevin’s the one who has failed the most.

The only people who have failed more than Kevin are the Project 52 team themselves. They’ve even posted a semi-apology on their site to people who have actually been keeping up with the challenge since January 1. Since then (that post was March 18th) they haven’t posted anything on their site. I find that amusing.

Despite the fact that I have pretty much guaranteed myself a winning position, I’m still planning to post every week for the rest of the year. It seems like a good challenge, so I’ll try to push myself to keep it up. Even if I have to stretch some weeks to come up with topics. Who knows? Maybe after the 52 weeks are up, I’ll keep going.

Enough About Bob.

2010-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

I found Bob’s Bug. It turned out that the issue was not with either the hardware or the software directly but with the Servo library. For some reason the Arduino Servo library needs to use two clocks from the Arduino. That means that when you start using any servos, immediately PWM output stops working on pins 9 and 10. This is not what I expected. It’s even documented. Unfortunately I didn’t read that documentation and instead relied on copying an example I found somewhere and modifying it in a way that I thought reasonable.

With that bug fixed (I moved everything except the servo off pins 9+10), Bob can now use both his servo and motors without a problem. Unfortunately this means I’m now using all of the PWM pins on Bob’s Ardweeny. I’m also using a lot of the other pins. Because of this I think I’m about done adding stuff to Bob. If I wanted more pins I’d have to mess around with some more shift registers and some other PWM chips. This seems like just too much work for Bob, so I’m going to take a break from Bob for now and start thinking about my next project. If I do anything more with him it’ll likely just be software tweaks.

At this point I think Bob is pretty much a success. He can successfully drive forward, stop before running into something (see the video below) and then back up and go a different direction. This works at least as well as I hoped. I’ve learned a lot building Bob. Some of these lessons at random include:

building a robot frame is a lot of work if you do it with a hacksaw and hand file
making PCBs on protoboard using the green-wire technique takes a long time
shift registers are useful
parts with weak connectors need extra protection
Ardweeny is cool (and cheap!)
isolating the power from the programming is a good idea
connect all the grounds

overall I think I have a lot more appreciation for what it takes to make a robot. Now for my next one I hope to use these lessons to make something a little more advanced. I’ll write about some of my ideas in a future post.

In the meantime, here’s a quick video of Bob not running into stuff:

Bob's Got Bugs!

2010-06-16T00:00:00-07:00

Bob’s parts have all been mounted together now. Some are more solidly mounted than others, but he’s staying together so far. Since I got everything together I was able to finally run a test where he moved! He can actually move faster than I expected. You can see his first “steps” in the video at the bottom of this post. Note that this is at 20% power. At full speed he zips along pretty well. Oh, and you can see part of my new floor in this video too.

I’ve not actually done anything about the motor that I wrecked the connector on. For now I’ve just adjusted the software to handle the different rotation on this motor and it seems to be working well enough.

Individually, Bob can control all of his parts. He can move his servo left and right 90 degrees either direction. He can measure distance with his PING))) sensor (Bob only wants to think in metric, so he measures distance in centimeters). He can move any combination of his motors forward or backward (with individual speed control) or set them to coast or brake. All of this works just fine when it’s run once (eg. start all motors going forward).

Bob’s not perfect yet though. There is a bug hiding somewhere and I’m still trying to track it down. After sending a few commands to the motors it seems something is eventually getting corrupted. If I keep sending commands eventually motors are going when I don’t want them to be and not going when I want them to be. This is obviously a problem. I’m not sure yet whether this is a hardware or software problem. If it’s a hardware problem my best guess is that I wired something wrong when connecting the two shift registers. If it’s a software problem I’m also suspecting my code that’s working with the shift registers. In either case I hope to track it down soon, fix it, and be able to explain it next week.

Here’s the video of Bob’s first trip:

Hopefully my next video will be of him going toward a wall/object and stopping before running into it. If I can get his bugs worked out.

Bob's In Control

2010-06-09T00:00:00-07:00

I made lots of progress on Bob finally in the past week!

The power supply that I wrote briefly about in my last post has been working pretty well so far. I’ve been testing both with a 9v wall-wart power supply and with 6 NiMH 1.2v batteries. In both cases it has done what I needed.

I did a lot more testing and prototyping and then I built a working motor controller. It’s pretty ghetto looking, but it is now working! It is able to control all 4 motors independently. There are a number of things I would do differently next time, so I guess it was good experience. I especially think it will be worth my time to get setup to make custom PCBs instead of green-wiring the whole thing on a prototype board. Anyway, this is what the board looks like now:

So put together with the frame, the power supply, the battery pack and the Ardweeny, Bob now looks like this:

and more importantly, it’s possible to actually program him now!

The first program I wrote simply flashes the LEDs on his motor controller and then sets all 4 motors to go at about 50% speed. When I first got all the motors spinning using my controller (this was when I just had the parts sitting on my desk — I hadn’t mounted them to the frame yet), I was pretty excited! Unfortunately, once I got everything all mounted together though I had a problem. Only 3 of Bob’s motors were moving!

On further inspection, it turned out that one of the connectors on the back of the motor had broken off. These are extremely tiny and fragile. In trying to fix this I got the wires reconnected, but ended up making a bit of a mess of it. The long and short of it is that the motor sort of works now, but it spins the opposite way that I tell it to and I’m not entirely sure that it’s going to have as much power as the others. One tiny washer seems to have fallen out and I couldn’t get it back in place. I might end up replacing it eventually but for now I’ll compensate for it in software. I’ve also got to see if I can think up some sort of protection for the other motors so their connectors don’t also get broken.

Anyway, for the next while I’ll probably be focusing on getting the software working how I want it to. Once I get the software written to let me do things like forward, reverse, turn left and turn right, then I’ll hook up the wheels and start running some more tests with him actually going somewhere. I hope to take a video of Bob’s “first steps” when that happens. Stay tuned!

After moving is taken care of, I’m still planning to:

mount the boards a little more solidly to the frame
connect and write code for the servo
connect and write code for the PING))) sensor
possibly add some bottom and top protection to the frame
have Bob detect and avoid obstacles

Other things I’m still considering adding Xbee wireless for remote commands, but I’m not sure I’ll even have enough pins left for that without some serious juggling. I think pretty quickly I’m going to run up to some limits with Bob that are going to require more and more work to get around. I could use more shift registers and one or more TLC5940 chips to work around the pin shortage for example, but that would require rebuilding a lot of the components I have already built and it seems I’d be better off just working on the next robot at that point. So I plan to push the existing hardware as far as I can, and try to get him to do some interesting things in software, but I don’t think I’ll add too much more hardware to him at this point. I’m even debating whether it’s even worth it to replace his gimped motor.

That’s it for this week! Lots of other exciting (non-Bob) stuff going on that I hope to be able to write about eventually.

Mini Bob Update

2010-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

If Howie can blog 2 sentences and a video and Kevin can blog 2 pictures of something that solves a problem I don’t understand, without any text (I’m not sure I can even give full points for that on the scoreboard), then certainly I can make a short blog post about Bob even though I’ve not done very much.

So, since my last Bob post there are really 2 things I made progress on. One is Bob’s new power supply. I wrote before that I had built a prototype but since then I actually soldered the thing together. You can see a picture of it at the top of this post. I’ve tested with both 9v and ~7.2v input and it can output 5v and 6v. The 6v can actually be adjusted, so that I can reuse this board on other projects in the future too. It’s not very pretty, but hopefully it works.

The other thing I’ve done some work with is the shift registers and motor controllers. I put together the shift registers on a couple breadboards and managed to control 13 LEDs with 3 I/O pins from the Arduino. This is perfect for what I need. It will allow me to control all 4 motors using just 1 PWM pin per motor and 3 digital out pins total. This leaves me lots of pins (though only 2 PWM) on my Ardweeny to control other stuff. I’ve even started work on a more permanent board for this. If I’m lucky, by keeping this post short this week I’ll save myself some time tonight to be able to work on finishing up this board. This is what the setup I built to test the shift registers looks like:

Once I’m finished the motor controller board, I’m going to attach the three boards I’ve built so far (Ardweeny, power supply and motor controller) to Bob’s frame and I should be able to start testing some control software! My goal is to get the control working correctly for the motors first and then attach the servo and PING))) sensor once I’ve got that figured out. Hopefully there’ll be more updates (and pictures) next week.

Colliding Priorities

2010-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

My plan for the Victoria Day long weekend was to spend most of it:

working on Bob
doing stuff with my kids
relaxing

What I didn’t count on was that my wife planned for me to work on installing a new laminate floor in our family room over the weekend.
When it comes to a conflict between my plans and my wife’s plans, usually my plans need to change.

While we were working my wife told me “We should [renovate and] flip houses. We make a good team. I can paint, and you can do everything else.”

As such, instead of working on Bob, I spent most of the weekend doing such things as:

tearing out our old carpet and underlay
taking the old carpet and underlay to the dump
redoing some poor wiring on the TV cables in the wall/floor
chiseling out the bottom of the fireplace mantel
chiseling out the bottom of the door frame
getting started putting in the new laminate floor
taking everything off the wall so it can be painted
putting everything back on the wall
mowing the grass

On top of that, I found out on Saturday that there was a meeting I’d need to attend Monday at work. That ended up taking most of the afternoon and evening on Monday. So, no update on Bob this week, but hopefully I’ll be done with the flooring soon and maybe then I’ll get some work done on Bob again. No promises though.

Howie tells me I should stop being so handy. Then I’d have more time to work on fun stuff. The fact that there’s a lot I can do combined with the fact that I’m too cheap to hire anyone to do something I can do sure does seem to lead to me doing more work. I think Howie’s on to something there.

Mickey Mouse and Pluto

2010-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

I didn’t get enough done on Bob that I could write a whole post about. I did some work, but I’ll write it next week, combined with the work I do between now and then. Some readers might be tired of reading about him every week anyway. What I’ll do this week is attempt to answer (or at least discuss) a random question submitted by one of my readers. The question is: ‘Why is Mickey Mouse bigger than his dog Pluto?’

The first thing I tried to determine is whether or not the premise buried in this question is true. In the image above, it’s not so easy to tell that their sizes are so different. However in this picture from Disney World, it appears Pluto is actually bigger:

in this one I think you could argue he’s smaller:

this could be a trick of perspective and/or pose. Since I think the real question is why doesn’t the proportion between the two match what one would expect a priori — which would leave the mouse much smaller than the dog — I’ll not worry about whether Pluto is smaller or slightly larger and focus on why they don’t match proportions you’d expect.

I think this picture might shed some light on the subject:

In anthropomorphizing Mickey it seems Disney intended for him to approximate a slightly shorter than average human. I think Disney probably originally thought to make Pluto the same size as their other characters. However, as Pluto is supposed to be Mickey’s pet, he therefore had to be caninomorphized slightly in order to be distinguished from the anthropomorphic characters.

In conclusion: It is my contention that if Pluto is slightly smaller it’s because they made a compromise between making him approximately the size of the other Disney characters (human size) and making him dog sized which would have been even more strange.

Bob's been screwed!

2010-05-11T00:00:00-07:00

My new tap works better than the old one, especially since it’s not broken. So I was able to complete the remaining motor mounts and Bob’s been screwed together. The main pieces that make up his frame have also been reinforced, so he shouldn’t fall apart anymore. You can see the screws holding his frame together in the image at the left.

In my previous post I also talked briefly about Bob’s new wheel mounts. The new design required some careful manufacturing, but I think I pulled off an acceptable job. Hopefully they work well. Here’s a picture that gives you some idea of what the new ones look like:

Those are screws holding on the small aluminum pieces at the bottom. Those will tighten and hold the motors on.

I’ve also prototyped Bob’s new dual output power supply. Using an LM317 and a 7805 I have both 5v and 6v rails that I can use for the Ardweeny and motors respectively. The 6v rail can actually be adjusted via a pot to output a voltage anywhere from about 1.2v to just about 1v under the input voltage (theoretically up to about 36v). The prototype looks like this, but less blurry in real life:

and I’ll have to clean it up a bit and solder it together onto a more permanent board.

Two of the other tasks I listed in my last post also came to some level of completion. I finished adding the wires and connectors to the remaining motors, and I got started playing with the shift registers. I’ll probably try to get them hooked up with the motor controllers after I finish with the new power supply.

So, I got a few things done again. Maybe if I make a new list I’ll get some of them done too. Here’s what I’d like to get started on by next week:

Attach the connectors to the second motor controller
Get the motor controllers working with the shift registers
Finalize the new dual output power supply
Mount the battery holders and power supply to the frame
Mount the motor controllers and shift registers to the frame
Mount the motors and put on the wheels

Hopefully I’ll have lots of updates and pictures next week!

Is Bob just about done?

2010-05-04T00:00:00-07:00

Some people might be thinking to themselves, “Is Bob just about done?”

If you are one of those people, the answer is: No!

It would appear to the casual reader that Bob might be nearing completion. After all, last week I already had the motors and wheels spinning independently and I had the Ardweeny controlling them. The whole thing even ran from battery power. This past weekend I spent many more hours working on him, so one might assume that I’m even further along, maybe even with a robot that moves. Such an assumption would be wrong.

In fact, Bob’s probably less together than he was the weekend before last.

A number of factors have combined to cause me to need to redo some of the parts that were already “working”. The main issues I’ve run into in the past week are:

I found that the motor mounts I designed and built were not stable or sturdy enough.
I found out that the JB Quik I used for the frame was not strong enough. (possibly due to not enough roughening)
I took apart Bob’s motor controller so I could work on using the shift registers. (not started yet though)
The other motors, controller, and shift registers came in the mail.
I broke my 6-32 tap. (see image attached to this post)

While testing the motor mounts, I pulled one right off. This alerted me to two problems with my motor mount design. First, getting the motors mounted turned out to be a lot trickier than it should have been. Most of the problems were in getting the aluminum shims to stay in place while I tightened the set screws. After several tries, the motor mount in question came right off the frame. The second problem I was alerted to was that JB Quik wasn’t holding the frame together as tightly as I expected. I suspect this is mostly due to the fact that the aluminum was not roughened up enough before I applied the JB Quik. I’ll have to do some testing. The difficulty in actually mounting the motors though led me to review other options.

Over the course of the weekend I designed and built 5 new prototypes for mounting the motors. Each of these was made primarily of aluminum that I cut and filed using a hand file and a hacksaw. This took many, many hours and all but one of the designs I came up with were either too complex for me to build accurately or were still not sufficiently sturdy. Finally I came up with a pretty simple design that also seems pretty stable. I only have one prototype though, so I’ll need to see if I can make 3 more that also work.

The reason I only have one prototype of the new motor mounts is that in the process of redoing the frame, my tap broke. I had decided to screw the whole frame together to make it stronger than the JB Quik alone made it. Screws also play a prominent role in the new motor mount design, so I need the tap in order to finish the other 3. Luckily I was able to get one today from Canadian Tire.

Where does this leave Bob now? I am hoping to make some progress on the several of the following before next week:

Finish reinforcing the frame
Finish the other 3 motor mounts
Begin testing with the shift registers
Finish the new dual output power supply I’m building (6v and 5v)
Attach the wire and connectors to the two new motors
Attach the connectors to the second motor controller

For me, most of the fun is in designing and building Bob. I’m not in a hurry. In fact I’d probably rather not finish too soon. Since this is a hobby project, I have the time to keep working and reworking components until I get them to work to my satisfaction. And then I can still tweak some more! I’m learning a lot from both the things that work and the things that don’t. If everything worked the first time and I didn’t need to take things apart or redesign pieces I’d say I haven’t challenged myself enough.

Bob's Brain

2010-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve made more progress on Bob. It’s taken a lot more work to get to this point than I expected, but I’ve learned a lot. Here’s a really blurry picture of what he looks like right now:

In that picture you can see 3 new components that weren’t there in the last update. The one on the lower right is the Ardweeny. This is what it looks like close up:

That’s basically Bob’s Brain. It came as a package of parts that I had to solder together. It was pretty straightforward, though I would have liked to make a neater job of it and get the microcontroller closer to the PCB. Next time…

After I put the Ardweeny together, I needed to power it. When I have it connected to my computer via USB it gets power from the computer, but I don’t want to leave it connected to the computer all the time. The 6 AA batteries I plan to use can’t be connected directly to the Ardweeny though since their voltage adds up to significantly more than the 5.0 volts that the Ardweeny wants. In order to resolve this issue I needed to build a voltage regulator circuit. I built mine based on the second last schematic in this Sparkfun tutorial. It seems to work pretty well so far, though I do want to modify it to have a 6v output as well. This is approximately what it looks like:

except brighter. You can also see it in the first picture in this post, on the center-right.

After building the controller and power boards I was able to power up Bob’s Ardweeny and make it blink some LEDs, so I knew it worked. Blinking LEDs is great, but I think Bob wants to be able to do more than that so my next step was to hook up some pins and test out the motor controller. The controller board as I mentioned in my last post is a TB6612FNG based board. Here’s a close up with all the headers soldered on and wires connected:

I’ve now got that board connected to the Ardweeny and done some initial testing. At this point Bob can:

Spin his front wheels clockwise or counterclockwise (independently)
Vary the speed of his front wheels
Blink his LED
Be powered via battery, wall-wart adaptor or USB

But he doesn’t actually go anywhere by himself yet. Nor can he stand up, or speak Japanese (sorry kids).

Building the control mechanisms and other related pieces took longer than I expected so far but I think I’ve made pretty good progress. I did however run across a couple more issues though that I’ll need to resolve:

The TB6612FNG requires 7 pins to control and the Ardweeny’s only got 14 total. I plan to solve this using some 74HC595 shift registers (already ordered) to get some extra I/O pins.
The motors seem to work best with 6v but I’m currently using the 5v regulator circuit I built. I plan to build a new improved power supply which will have both 5v and 6v outputs and hopefully current protection as well.
The motor mounts don’t seem as stable vertically as I had hoped. I’m still thinking about this one. Hopefully I can find a solution.

Otherwise, my plan was to get the first 2 motors controlled first so I could tell if this motor controller, Ardweeny and motor combination would work for me and it seems it will. So I’ve ordered the other 2 motors and a second motor controller. Once I get these and deal with the other issues listed above, Hopefully Bob will be mobile!

Once he’s able to actually move, I need to setup the servo and PING))) sensor. At that point I think the hardware portion of the project will be complete (for now) and I’m going to have to move on to writing and debugging his software.

After that? Who knows!

Introducing Bob!

2010-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Last week I finally managed to get some wheels for my robot. They’re a lot smaller than the wheels I originally planned, so I had to scale back my other plans accordingly. My original plan was to build something similar to Oddot’s Wild Thumper. Plans change. Instead of 6 giant wheels with a custom suspension system, this robot will have 4 smaller (42mm) wheels attached directly to the frame. Since this is my first robot, simpler is probably better anyway. Over the past weekend I had some time to work on it, so this post is an update of my progress so far.

I’ve decided to call my robot Bob. This is what he looks like right now:

Notice that the wheels aren’t even attached yet. When they are the wheelbase will be slightly wider and he’ll have a bit more ground clearance. He’ll also be able to move! At least theoretically.

His whole frame is made out of aluminum held together by JB Kwik (this stuff’s awesome). This means he’s really light and pretty sturdy. I had all the aluminum pieces left over from previous (non-robot) projects. All the pieces were cut with a hacksaw and filed by hand. The couple places where I needed to use screws, I used a drill and a 6-32 tap to make the screw holes. The frame’s approximately 6.5 × 4 inches.

The only somewhat complicated part so far was designing a mount for the motors. As mentioned previously, these motors are tiny and the screws I’d need to use if I was going to just use the built in screw holes are even smaller. I wanted to mount them directly to the frame to make it more sturdy, but I want to be able to remove the motors later if I want to borrow them for another project. Just JB Kwiking them on is out of the question then.

The solution I came up with was to attach a small piece of square aluminum tubing to the frame and add set screws and some small aluminum shims to hold the motors in place. This is what the motor mounts look like:

In the picture you can see one of the shims in place. There will be one on the other side as well, then the set screws on the side can be tightened to clamp the motor in place. Only time and testing will tell if it works well enough or not.

Bob’s “eyes” are actually a PING))) Ultrasonic Sensor. It is mounted on a servo which will allow him a 180 degree field of “vision”. I may add some additional sensors later. Possibly infrared.

Power will come from 6 NiMH 1.2v “AA” batteries.

To drive the motors I decided that I’ll try a TB6612FNG-based driver board mostly because it’s cheap and seems like it will be good enough. The wheels aren’t going to turn side-to-side so I need to be able to control the motors independently to enable skid steering.

To control the motors, servo and sensor(s) I’m going to be using an Ardweeny.

The next steps are:

finish the rear motor mounts
build and test the Ardweeny
hookup the TB6612FNG board
test the motor control

If the motor controller works well, I’m going to order another one (one can control 2 wheels) and 2 more motors. Then I’ll need to wire the whole thing up and start working on the PING))) and servo controls.

I’ll post more updates as the Bob progresses!

Forget About the Moon (Think Bigger!)

2010-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

I read today that Obama is going to announce further changes to NASA’s mission tomorrow. Earlier this year he already announced that he was going to be cancelling the Constellation Program that Bush announced in 2005.

The most important part of the program was the development of heavy lifting capabilities as a stepping stone to future projects including a permanent base on the Moon. This is important because the Space Shuttle is being retired and there’s nothing ready to replace it. For near future, the US will have to rely on Roscosmos to launch anything.

From what I’ve read, Obama’s plan seems to include another new heavy lifting rocket but the focus really seems to be on three things:

Letting private companies handle more of the work
Keeping and creating jobs (even if their projects don’t make much sense)
Not committing to any specific goals

I’m a big fan of having private companies doing more in space. They have more motivation to be efficient and they’re also likely to be able to do things that aren’t so much research but are important for other long-term projects. Asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing and other similar projects are important but don’t really fall into the purview of NASA.

Keeping and creating jobs is important politically. Especially in the current economic environment. Not much else to say about that one, though it’d be nice if they were all working on something important.

Not committing to any specific goals seems to be a big problem. I think the idea of having private companies doing the day-to-day tasks like launching stuff into orbit could actually be a really good thing for NASA if they focus their effort on the more ambitious projects that push the envelope of science and engineering. But they need to set a target. Something difficult enough that it’s not certain that it can be done. Don’t say: “We’re going to Mars eventually.” Instead say: “Permanent colony on Mars by 2020”.

John F. Kennedy made it a national goal in 1961 to have a man on the Moon in by the end of the decade. The Apollo program not only landed 12 people on the Moon in 6 trips there, but created many advances in the state of the art in a variety of fields in order to meet that goal.

If the USA can’t come up with their own motivation, my hope is that Russia, China, Europe or even India will be bolder and start a new space race. Maybe having the Chinese flag painted across the whole face of the moon would motivate the US into action.

When You Get Stuck, Keep Digging

2010-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

I just read a great article expressing frustrations that I think a lot of developers have had but haven’t been able to express as well. One of the choice quotes:

“Libraries are a win. But they are not as big a win as they want you to think, and sometimes they are the kind of win that make you wish you’d lost.”

The 2 “prongs” of his manifesto are both really good things for developers to keep in mind. I’ve complained about these same issues many times. I’m sure other people have also had exactly the same issues in relation to my code. Hopefully improvements can be made all around.

If you’ve worked as a developer very long at all, I’m sure you’ll immediately think of a few other projects which have exactly the same sort of useless documentation he describes in “Prong 1”. I’m glad I’m not the only one fed up with useless automatic documentation ala rdoc, javadoc, phpdoc, etc. It’s often a lot easier to just look at the source and/or try a library out than it is to parse through a lot of the “documentation” some projects make available.

I’ve also seen first hand that it’s quite common to spend most of your time yak shaving while you’re trying to fit a solution to a problem it wasn’t quite designed for. It’s true that it’s better use of your time to fit someone else’s library that almost does what you want to your problem, but it’s definitely not as much fun as building something new. I guess that’s why there are so many different Ruby VMs.

In Transition

2010-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

I work at Layerboom building awesome stuff. Layerboom started and ran GeoVPS for a while using our awesome virtualization platform. It has however taken resources away from working on the platform itself and is therefore being shut down.

This site has been hosted so far on GeoVPS, but today is the last day for GeoVPS, so the whole thing has to be moved immediately.

I’m using Jekyll to basically generate this as a static site and thus I don’t really need a full VPS instance to host it. I was originally just going to move my files to either Rackspace’s Cloudfiles or Amazon’s S3, since I would just be able to upload the new files when I make them and forget about it. When I looked into this I found there’s a problem that prevents people from hosting their website entirely in either of these.

The problem is that it’s not possible to have a default handler for /index.html. This means that I can’t have people go to http://josh.wilsdon.ca, they’d need to include a trailing “index.html”. I really don’t want that since people who went to the front page without the index.html would just get an error.

So I kept looking around. It seems that there’s now a tool that makes a Jekyll site into a Rack app. So I think I might give that a try. If that works well, I’m going to try deploying to Heroku. Heroku looks pretty cool and I’ve been meaning to try it out anyway. If it works out I’ll get free hosting for my blog and perhaps I can start using some of the other nifty features of Heroku to eventually make some dynamic content.

We’ll see.

In the mean time I’ve moved all my files to a temporary location so there should be no disruption in your ability to view the scoreboard and see how badly Kevin’s failing.

UPDATE: If you’re seeing this, the site’s been moved to Heroku! It was actually really easy.

Sledge Hockey FTW!

2010-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

The Olympics are all over! I managed to go and see Sweden defeat Belarus in the men’s hockey. It was pretty exciting going to see some big NHL stars playing some pretty good hockey. I also managed just last week to see USA vs. Japan in sledge hockey (no, not the gold medal game) during the Paralympics, and I have to say that I think the sledge hockey was a much better value.

I’d never seen sledge hockey before. I read a bit about it before I went, enough to know that the rules were pretty similar to regular hockey and that the guys playing it are pretty tough. Actually watching it is pretty incredible. Some of these guys have no legs but they’re in way better shape than the average Joe. Their upper bodies are huge and they really smash each other into the boards. I watched some video afterward where one of the athletes was talking about how they get hit all the time with the ice picks on the end of other players’ sticks and it really hurts. Yeah, I bet!

Anyway, I have a whole lot of respect for those guys who go out there and go like mad. The NHL players I watched in the Olympics are amazing athletes but it felt different watching players who get paid millions of dollars to play hockey and the Paralympians who I can’t imagine are getting paid as much as they deserve. They really are an inspiration and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to experience watching them play. Even though team Japan didn’t manage to score a goal against team USA.

Is it possible to watch sledge hockey when the Olympics aren’t on?

Apple is awesome (and sucks)

2010-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday Fido and Apple conspired to break my phone (for now). I’ve got a 3GS and I was happy with the 3.1.2 firmware and my old baseband since I could jailbreak/unlock whenever I want to in case I’m tired of what’s in the Apple store or want to write my own apps. Anyway, I tried installing some Fido app and my phone crashed. I figured all I’d have to do was restore since I’d rejected all the updates to firmware 3.1.3 previously.

Unfortunately I found out that’s no longer so easy. Apple decided to stop signing 3.1.2 for the 3GS so that I can only restore to the newer 3.1.3 firmware. This newer firmware also forces an update of the baseband which so far is not jailbreakable and not unlockable. Technically my phone’s not broken, it’s just less flexible now than it used to be.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the App Store, so this is not really the end of the world. I just like to have the choice to install stuff Apple doesn’t like. I also appreciate the right to free speech even when I don’t have anything offencive to say. That’s why I was so disheartened when I found out that Apple was going to force me to upgrade. All of this made me start thinking more seriously about the ipad, which I was previously thinking would be a pretty cool device to have.

I really enjoy using Apple products generally and at first glance the ipad is pretty attractive. It’s a beautiful looking device and seems like it will be a pretty powerful machine for a number of tasks. With the ipad though, apps are going to be controlled in the same draconian fashion as they are for the iphone. This means Apple decides which apps I can and can’t use and I have to pay Apple for the privilege of writing apps if I want to put them on my phone. Webapps have some ability to bridge the gap here I think. Especially with things like JQTouch. But I don’t think that’s a full solution.

The end result of my thinking on this issue so far is that I’ll probably hold out on getting an ipad until either I get one for free (or really cheap) or until Apple fixes the issues surrounding app distribution. I’m hoping that someone else comes out with a decent tablet computer that’s close to being as cool, but much more open. Hopefully that would eventually put Apple in the position where they need to be more open to compete. I’m hoping Android does the same thing on the phone front. Especially if that can happen by the time my contract is up for this phone.

Until then, I’ll just have to hope someone comes up with a “fix” for the 3.1.3 firmware and the new baseband and that Apple doesn’t remove Cows in Space from the App Store.

Very tiny motors!

2010-03-10T00:00:00-08:00

I got the first 2 motors for my robot!

I ordered two GM20 motors from Solarbotics on Saturday and they came in the mail today. Though I’ve not tested these or any of the parts I ordered, I’m pretty happy with the pricing and ordering experience so far with Solarbotics. I’ve ordered electronics parts from a few places now: Sparkfun, Robotshop and now Sparkfun. These parts were shipped quickly and because I ordered enough stuff I got free shipping! I imagine the fact that Solarbotics is in Calgary helped with the shipping time. Their prices are pretty comparable and they also own HVW Technologies they’ve got a pretty good selection of parts. Overall, assuming that these parts all work I’ll definitely consider ordering from these guys again, even if only for the shipping.

I knew before I ordered them that these motors were small (the specs say 14mm) but when I opened the box they looked even smaller than I expected. These motors are tiny! Here’s an image showing a comparison to a nickel:

this motor is supposed to have a fair amount of torque though (37.70 in*oz), so we’ll have to see if it can drive my robot or not. My plan is to test with these two motors and get some wheels and see how things go. If tests show that these are powerful enough for my purposes I’ll be ordering 4 more and 4 more wheels.

P.S. I’ve updated my book list and rearranged it somewhat. I decided to try to add a list of books I’ve read in the past slowly. I figure this will help out for those who are either looking for a book to read, or trying to figure out which books not to get for me.

Now with archives!

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

This is my 9th post since I started in on this blogging thing. Since I haven’t missed any weeks so far in the challenge, my front page was starting to get cluttered. Since Kevin has managed to miss 4 weeks already, I even got free lunch today!

In order to make the front page a little less cluttered, I’ve moved older posts to the new archive page. The 5 most recent posts will still be on this front page, but older posts will be available in the archive. I’ve also added a link on the menu to the scoreboard page. That will help you keep track of how I’m doing in comparison to Kevin and Howie.

Other things I’m thinking about changing sometime in the not too distant future include:

make the scoreboard auto-updating (I’m currently updating it manually)
add project pages/sections for some of my ongoing projects (with pics/code)
add an about page saying something about me
comments (I tried to make this work already, but intense debate was way too slow)
add more awesome

So keep checking back.

If you have any feedback let me know! Just email <josh@wilsdon.ca>.

Wheels or Tracks?

2010-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve still not ordered some of the parts I need to get started building the body for my robot. The main reason I’ve not yet ordered the parts is that I still have a few design decisions to make first. One of the bigger design decisions outstanding is what sort of propulsion system this robot will be using.

My first thought was to make it use tracks like a tank. I thought this would give it the most mobility over the widest range of terrain and be simpler to build. Plus, tanks are way cool! After some reading though, it seems that may not be the best choice. Tracks are not simpler to build (more parts!) and there are a number of other factors which I had not considered.

It turns out that tracks do in fact have better mobility over many types of terrain. This is because they spread the weight of the vehicle over a larger contact area and small obstacles are no problem because while some parts of the track may be off the ground, the remaining portion still in contact with the ground continues to propel the vehicle forward. This larger contact area however also has a number of drawbacks.

One big drawback of a track-based design is the fact that the additional contact with the ground also slows your vehicle down. Another drawback, probably more critical for some applications, is that the track is a single point of failure. If your vehicle has multiple wheels, it’s possible for it to keep going if one fails. If a track fails you can only go in circles. This fault-tolerance is one of the reasons that both NASA and the ESA are using wheel-based designs for their rovers.

When I first thought of a wheeled design, I was thinking 4 wheels. I might even have chosen tracks over a 4-wheel design. But it seems 6 or 8 wheel designs give you many of the advantages of tracks while mitigating the drawbacks. A 6-wheeled vehicle can still go relatively fast since the contact area is lower than that of a pair of tracks, but it can also keep multiple wheels in contact with the ground when overcoming obstacles. Especially when coupled with a decent suspension system.

At this point then, I’ve pretty much decided to build a 6 wheel robot. This seems to be the best compromise between all of the factors mentioned above. I think I’ll order 2 motors for now in order to test the size, torque, and speed. This will also let me build and test the control circuitry. Once I have the motors in hand and have done some testing, I’ll begin the next stage which is the design of the chassis and possibly the suspension system. Then I can start building.

Cucumbers - Scourge of the galaxy

2010-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

Most people who read this probably already know about my intense dislike of the disgusting fruit known as the “cucumber”. The mere smell is enough to cause me to expend great effort to keep my lunch where it belongs. I seem to be able to sense its evil presence from a significant distance. I imagine it is the same feeling Obiwan felt when Alderaan was destroyed. A great well of evil rolled into an ugly green fruit. Something that truly does not belong in any reasonable universe.

I have long wondered why it is only I that can sense the inherent evil of this fruit so many pretend to enjoy. A little bit of research (read: Wikipedia) indicates that the reason is that most people are simply not very good at detecting Phenylthiocarbamide. Related to that might be the fact that I hang around people who drink a lot of coffee and tea, and those people are statistically less likely to be able to taste PTC. Apparently I am part of “a small but vocal minority” of people who experience cucumbers as “a highly repugnant taste”. I am being oppressed by the tyrannical silent majority!

So I’ve come up with a few “facts” that I hope will help you realize just how dangerous cucumbers really are. The majority of people who:

get bitten by sharks
are involved in plane crashes
listen to Rick Astley

are part of this majority for whom cucumbers are not repugnant, and have likely even enjoyed eating them. So please consider that next time you think it’s a good idea to eat a cucumber. The more cucumbers you eat the more likely you are to have some sort of horrific accident. Especially if you’re anywhere near me. Also be aware that I’m not afraid to crank up the Rick Astley in order to get you and your cucumbers to leave!

I’m sure that now that you’ve seen the light, you’ll never eat another cucumber. On behalf of those of us non-PTC-challenged: thank you! We appreciate it! I suggest you eat a non-repugnant carrot instead.

Hope you brought your rain jacket

2010-02-11T00:00:00-08:00

So… I’ve been really really busy with work. We’re building the awesome. In the meantime, everyone is coming to Vancouver. Yesterday I saw some of team Sweden walking in front of my office window. They looked lost and confused. I hope they found the pub or whatever they were looking for.

Anyway, if you’re coming to Vancouver, my suggestion is to bring a rain jacket. I imagine a lot of people out there are planning to bring earmuffs, parkas and mittens because they’re thinking ‘Winter Olympics’ = ‘cold’. Well, that’s not going to help you here. All you’re going to end up with is wet mittens. The thing some people don’t realize is that not all of Canada is cold. I’ve lived in cold parts of Canada. This is not it, it’s the wet part. If you don’t believe me, go read about it. If you got to Whistler, it might get a little bit colder. I’m talking about Vancouver.

That’s about all I have to say for now. Oh, except don’t bring an umbrella. I really don’t like umbrellas. There’s no room for them and they just end up getting in the way! Especially when the streets are packed with people. Instead bring a rain jacket.

P.S. It seems as though Kevin’s now failed twice since he promised us free lunch for a week. Does that mean 2 weeks of free lunch?

The problem with cars is people

2010-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

I dislike cars. Actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that I dislike most personal transportation that is human-controlled but not human-powered. This mostly means I don’t like cars, vans, trucks, taxis, etc. But here I’ll lump them all together as ‘cars’.

I own a car and even drive, but when possible I avoid cars. When I can’t avoid being in a car, I try to avoid driving. If it’s the only viable way to get somewhere, I’ll drive but I’d much prefer taking a train or walking when it’s reasonable to do so. If it were possible I’d gladly give up my car and rely entirely on non-powered transportation. Unfortunately, in the time and place I currently live, not having a car is a difficult option to justify.

The reasons I don’t like cars are manifold but they include (random generalizations):

cars are loud
cars are expensive
gas is expensive
cars stink up the environment
cars run on oil which is difficult politically and environmentally to obtain
people driving cars are dangerous
people think they’re better at driving than they are
cars are slow (compared to eg. Shinkansen)
driving requires concentration (which I’d like to use for other things)

The largest of these problems revolve around people (myself included). If I were the only person on the road and I didn’t need to worry about other cars or the drunk guy stumbling across the street, I might even enjoy driving. I could drive much faster while paying less attention. I’d never get stuck in traffic or at a red light. Unfortunately, in the real world there are lots of other people and vehicles sharing space with cars.

Once again robots could save the day! Imagine even a personal transportation option that looked exactly like your car but travelled much faster and was able to get you somewhere while you read a book. You’d just get in and tell it where you want to go and it’d take you there as fast as possible while you enjoy your novel. People are even working on this, but it seems to me that they’re not expending as much money or effort on that as people are spending on protecting the ability to drive cars.

Even if the technology were perfect though, the bigger problems that need to be overcome before I can stop driving for good are again people problems. The unsolved problems include:

Getting people to trust computer control.
Building proper failsafes.
If a computer-controlled car does crash, who do I sue?!
Everyone needs to adopt it before it can really work optimally.
Where would highway patrol get all their revenue without speeding tickets?
Some people think their “freedom to be in control” is more important than other people’s safety.

So… I guess I’ll need to have a car for a while longer.

UPDATE1: Research shows every hour you drive shortens your life by 20 minutes.
UPDATE2: That doesn’t mean you gain 40 minutes. Driving 60 minutes, you waste 80!

Robots!

2010-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

Since I was a kid I’ve wanted to build my own robots. While I’ve built simple machines with motors none of them have had enough complexity to really meet my definition of a robot. As technology advances, making robots that do complex things is getting easier all the time. Maybe I could just wait it out and 10 years from now buy $10 worth of parts to put together to make a robot with human-analog intelligence, but I figure if I get started building robots now, I’ll be able to build even cooler robots by then. Since robots are going to be taking over anyway, I might as well get on their good side as soon as possible.

For my first robot, I’m planning to use an Atmel ATmega328 microcontroller in the form of an Arduino Duemilanove (which I already have) and some full rotation servos (which I’m going to order) to drive it. I’ll add some sensors and then work on upgrading it to do more complex stuff. My initial goals for this project are:

Phase 1

build the basic drive mechanism (I’m planning just to attach wheels to the servos for now) and platform
have the robot drive forward and stop before running into something

Phase 2

add steering
add Xbee radio so I can control the robot remotely

Ideas for future enhancement

add a camera
have the robot drive itself autonomously
add sensors to avoid obstacles
add an arm to manipulate the environment
upgrade to a more powerful microcontroller

I’m sure my ideas of what will work best will change soon after I get started, and I’ll come up with new ideas for what to make it do in the future. As my work on this progresses, I’ll post updates here!

P.S. I’ve also created a scoreboard page to keep track of the status of the Project 52 challenge. This shows that Kevin already owes Howie and I lunch for a week. I feel like steak!

Listing my books.

2010-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

I could write here about how Howie failed the Project 52 challenge in week 2 after Kevin failed in week 1 and just call that my post for this week. But I think that all this meta discussion is starting to get redundant, so I’ll spare you and write about my books instead.

One of the things I really like to do is read books. Now that I’m taking public transit to work, I’ve got almost 2 full hours to read during my commute each day. Combined with the other time I spend reading, this means I’ve been going through more books. An hour or so ago I finished reading the 3rd and final book of Peter F. Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy (pretty good by the way, but ~4000 pages). Then I started thinking that I should put up a list of books I’ve read. There are a couple motivations for this. I figure it will:

help me remember which books I’ve read
allow other people who are interested keep track of what I’m reading
allow people who want to buy/lend me books to know which ones I’ve already read
increase the amount of content on this site

In order to make it easy to keep this list up to date, I wanted to find a service I could use that would let me just select books I’ve read or am planning to read or want to get and it would sort things out for me. When I looked, the 3 best options I could find seemed to be reader2, bookwormr and shelfari. I tried to look at these and none of them seem to work for me:

reader2 is currently not accepting new registrations (blaming spammers)
bookwormr doesn’t seem to have an API that lets me pull out my data and integrate with this site
shelfari doesn’t seem to have an API and seems a bit weird with their “virtual shelf” concept

Does anyone else have any recommendations? If so email them to <josh@wilsdon.ca>.

Until I find a service that I like I’ve just created a simple list page which includes the books I could remember reading recently. I’ll update it as I read or remember other books. This new page has also been added to my new menu/sidebar.

I won already!

2010-01-12T00:00:00-08:00

It seems Kevin challenged me and then proceeded to fall down on the job. He never posted anything and it’s well past the first week. Oh well, I’ve got to keep going now or Howie will beat me, and we can’t have that.

With that out of the way, what sort of stuff will I be writing about in the future? Good question. Some of the ideas I’ve got so far include:

Electronics (I’m trying to teach myself to build robots)
Computers (I spend a lot of time with them)
Books (I love to read books)
Building, breaking and fixing stuff
Go (the game – though I’ve not played for a long time)
My dog (because the rest of my family won’t let me write about them)
Other random stuff

We’ll see how it goes. It’ll be an adventure!

First Post!

2010-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

So Kevin challenged me to do this Project 52 thing where I have to write something on this site 52 times this year. I guess I’ll see how that works out. I figure by starting with not much here, I can count some of my changes to this site toward the 52 updates if I write about them.

I started this site with jekyll. This was Kevin’s recommendation. It seems pretty straight forward since it just generates plain files which suits me fine. I guess over the next 52 weeks (if I make it) you’ll get a chance to find something out about me.