Monthly Archives: October 2010

Crispy Asian Eggplant

Posted on 2010-10-30 by pappp

Playing around in the kitchen yesterday I made an interesting food:
crispeggplant_sm.jpg
I like eggplant parmesan type dishes, and I like Asian-style eggplant dishes, so I decided to split the difference and fry strips of eggplant in a coating like one would use for deliciously greasy crispy orange or sesame chicken, and top them with a thick spicy teriyaki-type sauce.
It came out pretty well, the eggplant slices were crisp and fluffy and delicious, but the sauce needs work; definitely more ginger, and chili oil instead of directly adding powdered hot peppers. It could also use some greens on the plate, like cooked broccoli florets, for balance instead of just gorging on edamame while I cook. Very interesting and worth playing with again, even if it isn’t quite there yet.

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New Teaching Robots

Posted on 2010-10-22 by pappp

281botparts_sm.jpg
Some days, I really love my job. That is the mechanical parts for 8 little teaching robot chassis I quickly designed, which will be used for, among other things, a late-in-the-semester EE281 lab where students develop their own line-following state machine and PWM motor control. Nice little Tamiya modular platforms with infrared reflectivity sensors to replace of the horrible, flaky, ten year old toy trucks with de-soldering braid brush sensors that are currently used. I will be recruiting folks (preferably undergrads with an interest in robotics) to assemble sometime next week after the rest of the parts get in.

Posted in DIY, Objects, OldBlog, School | 1 Comment

Iraq War Logs

Posted on 2010-10-22 by pappp

I was planning to get some work done tonight, but ran into a link about the release of the Iraq War Logs by Wikileaks, and got absorbed by the initial summaries and info-graphics from the news organisations with early access.
In short, the situation in Iraq is pretty fucking reprehensible, particularly because no one, except for a probable source, is likely to be punished for what has happened.

I’m also deeply unimpressed with the DOD Response, which I will paraphrase as “We don’t understand how the Internet (that we helped spawn) works. Also, we’re unrepentant about the various shitty behavior we’ve been caught covering up.”

One thing I am impressed with is the presentation by some of the media outlets, especially the interactive infographic from Der Spiegel (Link to English version), and the Google Map from the Guardian.

The important findings can be summarized in a single passage from any of the basic analysis (The Guardian’s is nice and succinct):

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as “enemy” and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count. [src]

Which hits the three key facts: 1. “Coalition Leaders” have been blatantly lying to the public, 2. 109,000 violent deaths, 3. More dead civilians (as defined by people with a vested interest in not reporting killing civilians) than combatants by almost a factor of two.

The last round on Afghanistan actually did change my attitude toward continued American involvement over there, despite the constant talking point that they wouldn’t:
Before I saw the leaks, I was willing to accept the argument that, like a child, we (collective for United States) made a mess and have to stay until we were done cleaning it up. After seeing the leaked material, it’s clear that a more apt analogy is a child that got into paint, and the only thing we can do to help now is get the fuck out and focus on cleaning ourselves up before we make the mess even worse.

As much as the Wikileaks folks are probably not saints, anyone shining lights into dark places and exposing the vile things that live there is doing the world a service.

Can we start gutting the DoD for cash to use on things that aren’t shameful now? Maybe redirect large fractions of the military budget over the next few years to things that will actually reduce net suffering?

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Spiffchorder Progress

Posted on 2010-10-12 by pappp

As I mentioned when the parts arrived, I recently decided I wanted to build myself a Spiffchorder to play with, and, more generally, play with the VUSB Stack, which provides software USB for most AVR microcontrollers, using a few cents worth of extra passive components. This seems to be an excellent generic solution to the “Modern computers don’t have hobby-accessible I/O” problem for most applications. I’ve actually been using a VUSB device for a while since my usbtiny AVR programmer is an ATTiny2313 running VUSB with some additional support chips and code.

When I ordered parts, Newark was out of suitably-packaged ATMega168 chips, and their larger (RAM/ROM), pin-compatible sibling the ATMega328p was so close in cost I would have ordered them anyway. There is a warning(#8) about -p suffix chips (stands for PicoPower, meaning some additional power staving features) and VUSB, but it seems to be a simple problem with naming conventions in the interrupt vectors, and is fixed in recent versions.
I’ve been grabbing an hour here and there to put it together over the last week. So far, I’ve already spent some time on one of my favorite activities…
spiffwork_sm.jpg
which produced a nice tight board (The back isn’t quite as neat, and the socket I ended up using suuccckkkks)
spiffboard_sm.jpg
which, as far as I’ve discovered, had only one assembly error (the pull-up network on D- was between ground and… ground because I counted wrong), which was easily remedied.
While I was assembling I also put together a half-assed first approximation keyboard to test with
spiffkeys_sm.jpg
Which will eventually be upgraded… I’m thinking something flexible that can be clipped to the outside of my left pants pocket, or flopped on a flat surface such that the clip maintains the curvature, but I really just want to play with it and see how (un?)comfortable it is to use a chording keyboard. Maybe I’ll get bored and build a key-glove, those always look fun (and useless).

Now for the real problems… even after I fixed the wiring glitch, and touched up the code (minor fixes to make it recognize the 328p and set the fuses correctly), I wasn’t getting anything when plugged into USB. I borrowed a 168 from another project (and transparently swapped in a 328p there) to test the vanilla code, and it resulted in a board that generates a stream of errors like

usb 2-1.1.3: new low speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 15
usb 2-1.1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32

when plugged into any of my various Linux boxes. I then decided to upgrade the VUSB version (the one the 0.98 release is built against is truly ancient), which only took a few minutes of tampering to set up the usbconfig.h (and Makefile) to work with the Spiffchorder sources and IDs. Unfortunately, this only fixed the 328p problem… it now does exactly the same thing as the vanilla 168 version, and produces a string of USB enumeration errors when plugged in.

My understanding is that -32 errors are usually something to do with devices that aren’t correctly handled by ECHI (USB2) mode controllers, but a device that requires you disable ehci mode on a modern computer is pretty much useless, and it doesn’t appear VUSB should have that limitation. This is my current working tree, it seems to be at least as sound as the distributed version; when I get it working I’ll ping the original author about the update, and replace these if it turns out to be a software problem. I’m going to hook it up to some instrumentation on campus tomorrow to see if I can find the problem, I suspect something screwy with the voltages on the USB Data lines.

Posted in Computers, DIY, Entertainment, General, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

SC’09 Video

Posted on 2010-10-10 by pappp

I did a taped group-promotion and demonstration of the MOG Maze at Supercomputing last year, but we were never able to actually find the video posted online. I was doing an unrelated identity-management search while working on Ph.D. applications, and … here it is at techinsight.tv, with somewhat illogical search terms. Embedded below.

*obligatory listening-to-recording-of-own-voice cringe*

Posted in Announcements, Computers, DIY, General, OldBlog, School | Leave a comment

The best kind of box

Posted on 2010-10-05 by pappp

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is the kind full of TOYS (or, well, toy parts).

This order has some bits and bobs (optoisolators, limit switches, etc.) for the never-ending milling machine project, a couple spiffchorders worth of parts (more on that later), and some spare ATMega328s, because they seem to be a universal solution to “medium” microcontrollers.

This is the first time I’ve made a personal order through Newark, their “We won’t tell you exactly how much this will cost to ship until you’ve agreed to pay” policy is more than a little customer-unfriendly for small orders, and their website is the furthest thing from user friendly… I AM an electrical engineer, and picking what I want there is a challenge. I made a couple mistakes in this order: I grabbed 15.24 mm (as opposed to 7.62 mm) 28pin DIP sockets (just not reading), and apparently not all 12×12mm MCDTS2 switches can accept the caps described as “Switch Cap; For Use With:12×12mm MCDTS2 Series of Multicomp Tactile Switches; ” because the ones I ordered sure as hell don’t have attachment points for the covers like the picture in the datasheet.

Otherwise, very satisfied. Low price, massive selection, and fast ship. I think I’ll add them to the list. For the curious, my parts usually come from DigiKey, Sparkfun, and AllTronics, which are broad, easy, and cheap respectively, although other vendors don’t have the cachet of the little red Sparkfun boxes.

Posted in DIY, Entertainment, General, OldBlog | Tagged | 1 Comment