Back to blogging

It's been a busy semester, but it's over now. I'm returning to blogging as a way to trying to be more organized and to share interesting things with others.

The first question: does this make any sense? Who really cares what my to-do list is? I like having a place to store hyperlinks, since that's where I keep a lot of my ideas. Hopefully, that will be helpful. I'll keep lists in my gmail tasks and see how that works.

Interesting things:

• The ideas behind the quantum leaps framework are excellent. The book introducing these concepts is excellent if you can survive the introductory chapter (the "fly-n-shoot" game isn't a very motivating example).
• An annoyance: the examples tend to compile and run in DOS mode on a free compiler. That's just not very appealing to me. It would be fun to "port" the framework to run under Python, since the framework is pure C, making it multi-platform.
• The framework doesn't include a library for a particular processor. That would be very helpful, since some of the implementation details aren't clear to me. I'm considering creating just such a library for the PIC24. There is a TCP/IP stack implementation, which looks interesting; perhaps a good starting point.
• The author's blog makes for very interesting reading.
• Get your Starkville weather updates from Doug Gillham, an excellent meteorologist. They're particularly helpful for severe weather (more tornadoes, anyone?).
• A book from the National Academies Press, The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?, gives a great explanation of why power limits growth in computing performance. High-performance computing = low power computing, which is a very different paradigm.
• NASA posted a draft of their robotics roadmap. Now, if I could only find the interest to actually read it...
• I'm still looking for a good platform for Intro to Robotics. Some good finds: either the Stinger or the Dagu Rover 5 look good. Both have encoders in addition to DC motors, wheel/tracks, and gearing. However, both probably draw more than 1A for the motors, so I'll need a beefier H-bridge. An L298 would work, but needs external diodes and doesn't seem breadboardable. It looks like there's a nice product with all the necessary parts. As a second alternative, there's the Sparkfun motor driver, which contains a micro to do the PWM.
• An amazing paper on what computer science really is. A lot of Biblical references also provide me with insights on how my faith can be expressed in an academic context.

Amazing bionic elephant trunk

Wow. I've seen a number of neat Festo demos, but this is nearest and dearest to my heart. Krishna found it.

Now, how can I get my hands on one of these? :)

Fun links

My inbox is growing, so I need to spend time to day thinning it out. Ouch.

Luxury cars run on 20+ million lines of code. Wow.

A student built a neat hexapod. According to the story, parts came from Crust Crawler Robotics, though I can't find them on that web site. It's powered by an on-board Intel Atom packaged as the Fit-PC2. Very impressive! Here's the video:

It looks like some research groups are making progress on the nanocam featured in Alex's body book!

Here's another video showing applications of that idea. It's a year old, but still seems like a simulation.

My list:

• Cal Dan Stutts
• Create test 2 for Micro
• Work on paper review
• Work on review paper revision
• Write recommendations
• Make SECON hotel reservations

Today's list

Looking around a bit more at the AVR community, it seems that WinAVR is the most common choice that many use to write C code for the AVR. However, there's not IDE; instead, it uses makefiles. Ouch. Not a good choice for teaching.

I recently did a voice-over for a simulation Buddy produced which shows the behavior of a fiddle string. I found this behavior complex and fascinating. Buddy's working on a version which will show the string in 3-D; below is a 2-D slice. Using Camtasia made is so easy to quickly record this.

I spend some time yesterday evening creating my new personal home page on the web, since my old home page is years out of date. It's fairly simple, but at least a start.

I felt like a kid in a candy store yesterday while order parts for the Summer Bridge program. I hadn't realized that Pololu (named after a valley in Hawaii) offered some many nice robotics parts. I'm also glad I could finally get the order placed; it took a while, but I think I found most of what I need.

Little did I know, but the first annual National Robotics Week will be held from April 10-18!

Today's plan:

1. I still need to update the Micro libs with the bug fix.
2. Spend a small amount of time on p14p. My plan is to put small but steady amounts of time in, since I can't afford to spend a lot of time on it.
3. E-mail as always. I'm mostly caught up, with just a few items to take care of.
4. Call Dan Stutts to finish our earlier conversation. Though not pressing; I can also do that on Wednesday.
5. Research -- I need to review a paper, revise two papers.
6. Funding. I really need to do this, but with other deadlines looming it's not looking like I'll make much progress. Perhaps I can put together one slide or make some other small quanta of progress.
7. Type in corrected Micro grades.
8. Clean up. My office is a dump. Update: better now.

Organiziation

The plan for today:

1. Check with Sol on the Micro parts order. Yesterday, I verified that the three power supplies he sent would work. This also means we can move to a cheaper power supply, I think.
2. Order parts for the Summer bridge robot. In particular, I'd really like a PIC24HJ128GP502 to play with.
3. p14p work - I figured out an important bug (building the same binary using two different versions of Python). Now, I can code on the PIC24 port and also work on Doxygen generation.
4. Recommendation letter for Brad -- need to do that today.
5. Weekly meeting for the robotics research group. I'd like to do a paper review, but don't have time for that today. The review is due the 22nd?, so I do need to get started.
6. Work on the review paper. It's due the 18th, so I need to jump on it.
7. Update the Micro libs, based on a bug report.

Weekly meeting:

1. Group lunch - Friday at 12:30?
2. Task list - review and update.
3. Review and update group policies - place dates for future sessions.
4. Neat movie found by Krishna
5. Research update
1. Dr. Jones
1. p14p - Progress; working on developing hardware interface libraries.
2. Funding - NASA pre-proposal rejected
3. Met with the Industrial Technology group on robotics collaborations.
4. Turned Buddy's amazing sim into a movie.

Neat products alert

Ryan, one of my Micro students, pointed out a neat product from Sparkfun, their LCD display. It's $35 and has an easy-to-use interface (serial commands to an attached ATMega), which is great.

Reading the latest IEEE Spectrum, here's a Roomba competitor which uses a laser rangefinder to SLAM the room it's in. Wow! I'd certainly love to play with one of those...

Snow day

Amazing -- today is a snow day. I'm working from home, which is nice. As always, a big goal is sorting through my e-mail inbox, which still needs some work.

Random PC stuff: I'm trying to figure out how Google docs folder permissions interact with per-file permissions. I'd like to handle all sharing of the Micro labs using a folder, instead of changing the permission for each file. It seems like the permissions last edited take priority -- that folder permissions simply modify each file's permission. This would make sense in the case that a file can live in multiple folders. As long as I can get all the permissions looking the right way, I'll be happy for now. Part of the confusion is a lag: it seems to take a couple of minutes before the revised permissions take effect, which makes it harder to determine.

An amazing video Ricky found:

Today's goal is marketing: I'd like to look for proposal possibilities, develop PowerPoint slides to market our research, etc. More soon.

Shape sensing

Krishna found a neat shape sensor that might work for a continuum robot; it looks similar to ShapeTape. Some videos (here, here) nicely illustrate its capabilities.

More random PC fixes:

• Annoying MS security: viewing a downloaded .chm file doesn't work until you unblock it. Here's another method.

I'm mostly ready for classes with an updated schedule for Micro. I think I'll try some conditional release use this semester to assign homework, etc. Or perhaps I'll stick with e-mail, since that seems to work.

The weeks is vanishing

I'm shocked and amazed -- the week is vanishing. Wow. Today and tomorrow, then I'm done for the year!

Some fun reading: from the IEEE, automated to death (including a truly scary video simulation of a 777's autopilot going crazy).



I found another possibility for a demo robot chassis: a simple tracked robot. I'd like to use one robot for both Intro to Robotics, a summer camp, and a Micro demo robot. The one thing I'd like is encoders; the other question is power -- can this robot carry an arm? Update: here's a better link, including a video, plus a post on hacking in encoders.

I merged the data transfer code in to the main ECE3724 development line. That was more painful than I'd expected, but I think it all works now. I need to document what I've done, so others can use it.