This is what an academic Saturday breakfast looks like. Buttered poppy seed bun, electronics handbook, and waiting for fresh coffee. The simplicity alone proves I didn’t have a date. But this summer should rectify that, famous last words. The gal from y’day never got in touch, pity, as I found out she was new in the neighborhood. I like that in a woman, you know, new in town.
For a change, I have gossip. Eddy, Guitar Eddy, got himself a big settlement and went right out and bought himself a new car. Guys over 50 do that kind of thing, I’ve been told. He proceeds to the local pickup bar and gets himself a lady for the night. That’s where Eddy and I differ. I don’t think a woman my age at the local bar has anything in common with me, including the reason for being there.Noonish next day, Eddy is missing his wallet and his convertible. I don’t have the details, but who needs them at this point? Knowing Eddy, she was good-looking past the point of no return. There you go, even in my teens and even then rarely, did I ever date a gal without her own money and her own car. Nor have I ever been foolish enough to think an old broad was after me for my looks and sparkling wit. So I still got my wheels if not my wits, type of thing. (We’ll be fair and wait for the other side of the story.)
Indoors for mid-day, I re-read some of the material from a year ago when I was just beginning electronics. Was I ever right about how poorly written it was. Now that I know the fundamentals, it is shocking how idiotic even the highest acclaimed authors are in the field. You read it, you know what they mean, but you also know how far off base and how misleading they were when you trusted them.
For a deeper analysis of the crummy authorship, the most prevalent error is the use of indistinct pronouns. I first noticed this as a problem when learning Spanish, where pronouns are often intentionally fudged. If I write a single chapter of instructions, I swear I know better. Good writing uses the nouns, as in “connect the resistor to the capacitor” and not “connect this to that”. The intention here is to insult guilty writers, and I know there are so many of them.
Bingo bombed. It is operating below the critical mass that was present when Peanut was there every week. It’s an institution, so I’ll be there until the week before I head to Colorado. You know, this is the 33rd consecutive month of bingo (that's months, not weeks). Don’t be thinking it's just a fad. I’m saying the crowd has dwindled to half.
ADDENDUM
For those following our robotics study, here is the first definitive flowchart we developed after 16 months of study and labs. The sad part is how simple it looks but in the end we could not find a single source that spelled it out like so. Most textbooks presented each step in isolation—a lot of good that does. I figured out in late 2010 the Arduino is the go-between the analog and digital worlds. The rest was learned the hard way.
I’ll walk you through it. Input can be any of a huge number (but small variety) of rather expensive sensors ($30 & up). They measure temperature, heat, distance, volts, sound, frequency, or light. Most of them return a voltage (between 0V and 5V) as the variable.The Arduino extracts a digital representation of the sensor voltage and manipulates it with computer code. This code is a facsimile of logic boards full of relays, gates, and internal memory (EPROM). The Arduino then transmits the output to a group of digital pins. How those digital signals are used is the “smart” part of each design.
While it could go only to the control chip, device, or motor and get results, we’ve learned the extra step of also connecting a display so you can see what is going wrong. This display is independent of the data the Arduino is capable of returning to the computer in that the data displayed here is not feedback. Think of it as a meter. It is optional, but I consider it a must-have.
The control is usually a special purpose integrated circuit designed to operate some external device. Popular beginner’s controllers include a motor H-bridge, a dot matrix display, an LCD, or a growing number of specialty chips that interface with the Internet, Bluetooth, and ever-cheaper remote control toys. This controller usually takes the form of a printed circuit board familiar to anyone who has looked at a motherboard.
The device is the fun part. Here’s where you use imagination. Most of the time, it is a motor of some kind, attached to a gear, a robot, a mechanical arm, or another chip. This device does something almost but not quite as “smart” as the digital input (there is always a loss). However, in a real robot, there would be feedback to the input to supplement accuracy. This feedback does not have to be there, but putting it to work is part of the big plan.
Note that in remote control, which we distinguish from true robotics, the “loopback” is still there in the form of the nearby human. And in our books, that’s cheating.
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