One year ago today: July 30, 2013, Boca Raton
Five years ago today: July 30, 2009, reads like a diary.
Ten years ago today: July 30, 2004, a blue moon.
DAY
The day starts off quiet but stick around, we get into some awfully informative material shortly. Top story of the say is a guy who wants to build his wife a “pineapple tree” for her retirement party. That’s one happily married man, and this is the innards of the tree. Made from PVC. It is for decoration only, at first I thought he wanted to save the pineapple meat, but no. The cored pineapples fit over this stem, with a frock of cornstalk to complete the show. If you can’t follow this, you are in the wrong blog, seriously.
By 9:00AM I drove up to Ft. Lauderdale and bought a tablet of blank marine plotting charts. I’m still examining them as they are another of those things you are supposed to know. The charts are different depending on what you buy, which is another indication of how puzzling, how strangely puzzling, celestial navigation can be. I required hours to study the parts the book doesn’t even say. Four hours, I think.
Beyond that, the day was boring. I got a haircut and spent an hour at the library looking up definitions of stuff I don’t know. For example, I didn’t know that “front running” is when a stock broker places a small order of his own just before a large purchase order by one of his clients. The large order bumps up the price and you know the rest. (The library has no books, zero, on navigation.)
Libraries mean trivia. I was looking up the specs for various kinds of alloys. When you buy steel or aluminum, you are always buying some kind of alloy. The temptation is to weld, braze, or rivet the pieces, but the wise men of robotics say no. It makes internal pieces difficult to maintain or replace. They say that beginners have no idea how many times robot components will malfunction. The correct approach is to bolt everything together.
[Author's note 2015-09-30: the following passage is not clear. The closer we get to acquiring the tools to build a robot, the less the chances of that happening. Why? Because the major lesson we learn is that robots are a rich man's hobby. Except for trivial toys, it takes an organization with deep pockets. On the other hand, we do continual research on components. There is at least a hope in hell of inventing or improving a small component.]
This got me researching the robotic components I know least about. Motors and batteries. I learned that prototype robots should be able to run six minutes. If that doesn’t sound like much, the experts say try it. I will. In addition, the books say all the transistors I own are unsuitable for motor control. They’ve worked so far, but all tests have been on the laboratory bench.
Did I spend $80? I'm retired, you know, these things add up. Yes, that includes $3 for gas, $8 for stationary, $8 for breakfast, $5 for soup mix, $15 for screws (just said), you see how it fritters away. I got caught in the afternoon rain blast, that one cost $6 in the coffee shop to wait it out. Sadly, the only coffee shops left in Florida are the franchises. You can go to a regular restaurant, but the regular restaurants are all alike. Specials that aren’t really special, 50-something “career” waitresses, and no matter what you order, it's going to cost at least $8.
And we are nearing the point where we’ll have the correct tools to build a robot that, hopefully, will be useful. One recurring theme is the steering method. Most beginner’s projects use differential wheel turning, you know, the robots that can spin around in place. Yet, people like us quickly notice this is not the form factor they send to Mars unless it has six wheels.
The concession here is that to cover any real amount of territory, four wheels are needed. And in the standard “automobile” arrangement with two-wheel rear drive. The front wheels are for steering. One method is rack and pinion, but that is only one of several ways the steering wheel motion is transmitted. The whole arrangement that allows the inner wheel to turn sharper than the outer wheel is technically known as “Ackerman steering”. And it is far beyond our capabilities.
Reading any robot book will always steer you to the jock version—fighting toys. The mine’s-bigger crowd who never really grow up. I’ve never watched a match but I read part of the rule book. It seems to be a field for rich fanatics, with some of the 400 pound robots costing $30,000 just in parts. The bouts are three minutes, being incapacitated for 30 seconds is considering a loss. Three judges award points of aggressiveness, damage, and strategy. Is that military enough for you? I mean, where else can little minds get points for aggressiveness.
The obvious major defect is that these robots don’t introduce any new technology. They are not experimental platforms. Nor can they shoot, launch, or project anything, so how helpful is that? I don’t predict there will be any scientific breakthroughs from anyone who builds “combat robots”. It’s a field that places the focus on the wrong concepts.
EVENING
What is this? Price progression of mac and cheese dinners. As seen here, the ultimate illustration of capitalism gone wrong. We are taught (in Econ 101) that prices will go down with volume production. This should happen even with inflation—price is a number. (If your monitor doesn’t show, the prices left to right are 60¢, 80¢, and $1.25.)
Oh yeah, your trivia. How about these? Did you know Coke pays more for the aluminum can than to make the drink inside it? A tuxedo is a tail-less dining jacket (not the whole garb). And the AM/FM switch on your radio stands for “American Music” and “Foreign Music”. And in America, there are two things that are certain besides death and taxes: shipping and handling. (Hey, it was a new joke back in 2014.)
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