Debauchery

Posted on 2009-04-11 by pappp

It’s amazing how a night of debauchery every now and then can improve one’s feelings about the world (once the hangover wears off). Pictures and specifics intentionally excluded.

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Work Gloves

Posted on 2009-04-07 by pappp

How did I ever get anything done without them?
workgloves_sm.jpg
At the recommendation of a friend I got some machinist-style work gloves (these) for working on my CNC Mill project (which is coming along rather nicely); I don’t know how I ever accomplished anything without them. They allow you to use your hands with incredible abandon — accidentally clipped your finger with a file? no problem. Tapped yourself with a spinning dremel bit? no problem. Grabbed a razor-sharp freshly cut metal edge? no problem. They also allow you to maintain grip irregardless of what may be on your hands, both from the cutting oils and slippery bits perspective and from the tiny sharp metal fragments perspective. There are even nice little pads on the tips of the fingers to make the important areas grippier.
Then there’s my favorite feature; the knuckle guards. This style of glove is typified by rubber splines over the backs of the knuckles, which absorb and spread out any impacts, so when your hand slips while tightening something, there is no cursing and bleeding. The splines do however make one feel compelled to punch at things, just because you know you can.

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Diploma

Posted on 2009-04-05 by pappp

diploma_sm.jpg

My diploma finally showed up in the mail about a week ago, and I feel compelled to put a picture of it online to brag, especially for the contingency that I need to link it to prove my credentials in matters electronic (yes, even college degrees can be reduced to “I’m going to use it to be a jerk on the Internet”). I was curious how they were going to fit 3 degrees; apparently UK isn’t especially well prepared to handle people earning more than two simultaneous degrees, and there is even some sort of opposition to people trying the EE/CompE/CS trifecta, but the engineering staff are seeing to it that we get our diplomas. I’m pleased that the major with which I most associate is the big one, but I’m a little disappointed they didn’t fit the math minor on, my transcript says I did get it.

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SmartPixels

Posted on 2009-04-03 by pappp

ColorSample.jpg
One of those things I’ve been playing with intermittently just came to fruition: SmartPixels. Cheerful little LED+Microcontroller widgets which light up in interesting ways. All the code is written in a modular way so it is easy for me (or anyone else) to add sensors to the two remaining pins, or modify the behavior in other ways. Full source is available at the page above.

The biggest holdup in completing this little project was not actually the result of a difficult problem, but me forgetting, AGAIN, that when writing code for AVRs, any variable accessed inside an interrupt service routine MUST be marked volatile , or it will be treated as invariant by the compiler.

If I can figure out a convienent way to post video I will, even the simple color fade behavior I currently have loaded is mesmerizing.

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CNC Beginnings

Posted on 2009-04-01 by pappp

The beginnings of my CNC project, in the form of parts for the XY table, and associated tool pile:
XYParts_sm.jpg
The motion capability will be 9” in the X dimension and 6” in the Y direction, the Z axis is on hold until after the semester is over, there just isn’t time to design it in now.
Drives:
Each axis will be driven by a 130 oz-in NEMA23 Stepper (Lin Engineering 5618S-58-01)
The lead screw to run the axis is a 3/8” coarse threaded rod, cut to length
The travel nuts are 1.125” coupling nuts (long, to help with backlash without spending money)
One remaining problem is couplers for attaching the lead screw to the drive shaft, there are lots of options, but they all seem to cost at least $10/axis. I suspect unless something better appears I’ll end up with lovejoy couplings.

From aluminum square tubing (1” OD, .062” walls):
8”x8” (outside) square frame for Y axis
6”x12” (outside) rectangle for X axis
The framing will be assembled with bolts, tabs cut from 90deg angle stock, and a bit of epoxy to make it easier.

The next big fuss is figuring out the driver circuits. The motors are rated for 2A at any practical voltage, and only show about 2.6Ohms/coil of resistance, so its going to require proper current-controlled drivers, which may be expensive.

The thing I’m liking most about this project is that I’m learning a huge amount of practical, hands-on knowledge about metalworking and mechanical devices in a hurry, in a low-investment environment so I can experiment and really get a feel for things. I’m not sure if I’ll ever do much more metalwork, but its a good skill to have.

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AVRs are Amazing

Posted on 2009-03-28 by pappp

To add to all the other reasons I love AVRs (cheap, featureful, good development tools, beautiful assembly language), they are now also to be considered almost impossibly resilient: I just made a mistake and reverse biased an ATTiny13 micro (swapped Power and Ground wires), causing it to heat up until it was too hot to touch… I just popped it back in the programmer after it cooled down, and it is completely fine. Win, atmel, win.

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Bored Should be Obsolete

Posted on 2009-03-26 by pappp

The collexion meeting tonight had a discussion basically on the idea that no one should be ever be bored anymore, because there are so many cool things one could be doing. My current list of things I want/need to spend time on, ignoring the mundane:
* Working on my SmartLEDs project [If I remember, I’ll edit to a link to the pending project page once I put it up]; the basics are almost done (software PWM for color mixing, etc.), next I want other people playing with it too and try different sensors and behaviors and diffusers and such.
* Getting started with the LARs stuff my masters project is based around; I think I want my first major contribution to be a behavioral-level software simulator for a full implementation of the proposed architecture. If I’m feeling really bold it might be parallelizable to run on the big machines (or their smaller, older siblings). I suspect before that I will be working on cleaning up my predecessors’ mess, and helping to get their SC paper out the door.
* Continuing to start up my desktop CNC mill project; I want to try to build one for <$200, and I get to write off the time and money guilt as school activity, as the XY table component will serve as the class project in EE572/Digital controls for myself and two other students. I’m getting a good feel for parts and designs, going for something not dissimilar to this.
* Arranging my CGS500 final project, I’m fairly sure I’ll be doing it on UI/UX, and supporting analysis of current and notable historical examples of computer interfaces with articles (using The Humane Interface as a jumping off point for the analysis). I think it would be REALLY fun to do it as a heavily multimedia presentation, with virtual machines running different systems and applications to demonstrate interspersed with the slides, but I’m afraid it would detract from the depth and be difficult to do gracefully.
The consensus was that bored people are boring; there’s really no excuse for not being able to come up with things you want to do, especially with the power of the internets focused through places like make and hackaday to use for inspiration.
I had to type this post TWICE because flatpress failed me when I accidentally hit shift+back and navigated back without saving. Flatpress is really not an ideal engine, the “Post to the date when the draft is created, not when the post is posted” misfeature drives me nuts, but I still can’t fault it for being easy to deploy in space I don’t have to pay for.

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Hugo Award Nominees

Posted on 2009-03-22 by pappp

This year’s Hugo award nominees are up. The big thing to note is how many of the entries have “read online” links next to them.

The only novel nomination I’ve read is Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother which, while definitely not high-end prose (its usually classified as young-adult fiction), is something everyone should read RIGHT NOW to understand the way our paranoid society and technology interact. Seriously, go, right now, Free in your format of choice or on dead trees from a bookstore. It’ll only take a couple hours at most. I also find Anathem promising; its on my reading list, but I haven’t got to it yet and doubt I will for some time.

Otherwise, I’m not terribly impressed by most of the options, too many of the nominees are derivative, or adaptations, even down into the short stories. Some of them are very good adaptations, and many of them are very enjoyable if you’ve read the precursors, in particular, “Shoggoths in Bloom” is good fun if you’ve read “At the Mountains of Madness” (Available here via Aussie copyright law and Project Gutenberg) or any of Lovecraft’s related works. I’m working my way though the ones with read links, thus far “26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss” is the most original thing in the collection, both in terms of content and format. The format and diction is genuinely bizarre, but I found it well suited to the story and the context of reading it online.

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All of this has happened before. All of this might happen again(?)

Posted on 2009-03-21 by pappp

The end of the Battlestar Galactica TV series just finished, and it is a satisfying end to the most impressive piece of film SciFi (distinct from syfy, you audience-alienating douchebags) in years. I put it on footing with Babylon 5 and Firefly, my other two favorite SciFi TV series. Not going to spoil here, I usually torrent and watch later myself, and respect those who chose to. The thing that puts it above the rest isn’t so much the premise or plot (although both are good), it’s that the acting and writing and scoring (especially the scoring) is spectacular.
It’s basically beyond ruin at this point, even if The Plan (movie, tells parts of the story from the cylon’s perspective) and Caprica (TV series, tells the story of the creation of the cylons), the remaining two planned bits of the franchise are crap, it will still have been a great run, making it one of those rare TV series that is good as (far) more than background noise.

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Lexington’s Unsightly Hole

Posted on 2009-03-20 by pappp

The hackers have been meeting up at third street stuff (my second favorite coffee house after Common Grounds)on weeknights for a while, which means I walk by Limestone and Vine most afternoons right past this:
unsightlyhole_sm.jpg
the unsightly hole in the middle of Lexington’s downtown. Every other time I walk by it seems like someone comments on it, usually asking where The Dame has moved.
Everyone remotely alert living in Lexington is reasonably familiar with the hole, it used to be a block that contained interesting things; Mia’s, Busters’, The Dame, The Mad Hatter, etc. It is now the future site of the Webb companies CenterePointe project (yes, with TWO unnecessary ‘e’s), a 550ft mixed-use monstrosity which has been the source of endless controversy. This UrbanOhio thread (I don’t know anything about the site) has aggregated most of the news on it. Take a look at the renderings for the current design:
centerepointe.jpg
My two thoughts are that the design would be hilariously phallic if it weren’t about to become the tallest building in Kentucky, squarely in the middle of Lexington’s downtown, and that it, quite appropriately, looks like it’s giving the city the finger. It’s actually a little toned down from the earlier renderings in that regard.

The fact that the previous big, ugly, overpriced mixed-use structure put up in Lexington (Center Court) was such a resounding success that even Starbucks moved out should give a good idea of what the demand for that kind of space is in the area. One small high point, I am pleased to see that the current revision is going to have drastically more meeting space in the Marriott-managed hotel that is planned as one of the primary tenants, that space could be used to host conferences and keep the hotel alive after the Equestrian Games are over in 2010 (assuming the damn thing is even done by then), and Lexington goes back to having little demand for a giant hotel in the middle of the city.

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