One year ago today: August 28, 2013, early batbike excursion.
Five years ago today: August 28,2009, so, I was wrong.
Ten years ago today: August 28, 2004, beach picture.
MORNING
I was at the Tuesday memoir club meeting. It was the usual two hours of poetry and fiction. The pattern is the same, but there are some really talented writers there. I've mentioned the lady who writes about her past. She got a few singing. Hey, that's my job, but seriously, she told a story of her piano lessons at the age of nine. She didn't know the song about a bird with red wings and something clicked way in the back of my brain. Why, it was "Pretty Red Wing". I hummed a bar and it came back to her and she sang and some joined in. Back home I found a version by David Allen Coe.
Relax, I won't forget to list the topics while I was there. First was a new guy whose tale was about a student having a liason with an older lady who ran a boarding house. It was nothing, but in the question period, a lot of the prudes in the room took the opportunity to ask rhetorical questions designed to make themselves smell like Snow White. "Did they fall in love and get married?"
The other readings before I departed were the account of a lady singer on a ship who stopped at Leningrad, not knowing until afterward that exchanging money at a shop could have got her sent to Siberia. Another poem, nice, about what colors represent, as in red is for love. Then another poem about an old lady whose lived not in the past, but with it. An excellent poem on how to say you are sorry that my ex-wife could use. The usual other stories of slavery days which nobody in the room knows a damn thing about first-hand, but they persist. And a hilarious skit, "Don't Touch My Hair".
Sorry, I decline to publish any material from the meet. The skit was the best, about a lady applying for a job as a "trained cosmopolitan" at a hair salon. She just got out of prison for armed robbery, trying to hold up a bank with a banana. She got caught because she forgot her car keys at the teller and had to go back in. The security guard was blind, but his dog knew what to do.
What's this in the paper? Egypt bombing bad guys without clearing with DC first? Not asking our permission! What kind of insubordination is that? We all know how faithfully the US checks with Cairo before doing any Middle East bombing first. After all, we are allies. I've been reading the Herald.
So as not to show up empty-handed at Nova, I've taken some samples for the group. PNP transistors and diodes. These are impoysny. [Author's note: how's that for a typo? "Impoysny"? For the life of me, I don't know where that came from. So it stays. The damn things are impoysny.]
You need a transistor to switch the motor on and a diode to prevent a power spike back into the Arduino chip when the motor stops. I wonder how many ruined microcontrollers are out there because there are no warnings about this. As far as I know, I remain the only Nova person who has programmed an Arduino as opposed to merely downloading code. Remember the "25 Experiments"? I programmed those back in 2011 before I got bored.
But I am not the expert by a long shot. All the aluminum pieces I tried to braze eventually came loose. And the computer cooling fins I kept to cut into heat sinks defy being cut. At least not by the hacksaw and miterbox arrangment I thought to use. Why such tough metal? I did eventually cut one through, but some other method is in order. (I was later able to enlist the bolt cutters.)
NOON
I found my book on the SS Central America, the treasure ship. Here's a little serendepity. The author did much research into the route sailed and this was much sought after information by the treasure hunters. Hence, the chapters are full of navigation fixes that I glossed over a year ago. At least I think a year, as for some reason, I did not pencil in the date on this book. Anyway, I now read with relish the cordinates and bearings with complete understanding. I can imagine in my head the positions of these ocean spots from Ft. Lauderdale.
Attention all newcomers: there are inadequate warnings concerning the dangers of connecting up motors to the Arduino. Of course, you want some action, something you can see. But if you connect a motor to your Arduino, you will also experience the sense of smell as your $35 fizzles out. You should have one 5 volt power supply for your Arduino and circuit boards, another separate supply for the motor at its rated voltage.
Another caution is the programming code. C+ will lead you astray, it is full of exceptions and quirks that can activate the wrong pins and also burn out your Arduino. I have a well-substantiated theory about C+ programming and I've blogged it before, but it bears repeating. When I took my first programming classes back in the 70s, there were forty-six students in the room. The majority of them were not getting it. They made consistent mistakes that revealed inability to think logically. They kept inverting the commands and the variables.
They had tremendous trouble with terminology and resorted to inventing their own misleading descriptions. They never like documenting their code. They seemed unable to break things into digital parts except by strange and indirect routes. Their code was so messy that the instructors and smart students had trouble reading it. But the phenomena was that other dumbies who made the same logic and syntax errors could handily follow it.
Only seven of us passed the exam, an 85% failure rate. If that was all there was, it would have ended there. What nobody knew is that the 85% would become a majority on the job market. Tons of them went to work for MicroSoft. C+ code is degenerate (less natural than the preceding languages) and inconsistent, so it fit their mental abilities superbly. Their sheer weight of numbers buffaloed bad code into the computing arena and we are stuck with it to this day. If you suspect the reason Windows is so screwed up and virus-prone, yes, it is written in C+.
EVENING
How nice. There was a last minute cancellation of the Nova meeting by the organizer. I geared my week for this meeting and now it is kaput. That's a huge assumption that his presence is required. Stewardship of the group has long since passed to more dynamic hands. The strange part is that when he is there, the meeting time is spent watching short on-line videos and playing with small parts. There is very little exchange of information. I know I've learned nothing from the activities over there.
Besides, when a meeting is held once a month, you don't cancel it the day before. Not everybody checks their social media fifty times a day. But did you see the lady whose kid got expelled because she called the school board "ignorant" on her Facebook. While that is so wrong, she was the ignorant one for thinking Facebook was private. There are a lot of nasty people with nothing to do but troll and she set herself up.
Another annoyance was how they cancelled the meetings. The university people tend to regard those who don't embrace what is new as out of touch. The reason you may not have an iPod could only be because you still have a record player, type of attitude those boys got. These are not kids, but adults in their 30s and 40s who don't seem to understand that social networking is intrusive. So they cancel the meeting by sending a message to the web-page. Like other people have nothing better to do than keep refreshing their screens.
What do I think? Next meeting, I'm going to ask which students drove there because they didn't get the cancellation message. I suspect the ability to cancel on a "smart" phone encourages the callous (but not so smart) to do so and that isn't right. I check my computer before I leave, but only because I have one at my departure spot. There's a difference between a message and a direct contact of members, which they should be obligated to do and I'll bring that up. The meetup board has a spot for indicating you will attend, so it should have a spot that contacts you if they cancel and obligates them a little more. They have the information, but it is too easy to click a button and pooh-pooh those who by choice don't go near social media.
ADDENDUM
This passage is totally concerned with robotics, electronics, microcontrollers and programming code. it helps to recall that this blog was originally an archive and daily journal. The following is not for everyone, but read on if you like insight into the way the human brain operates at my age, that is, at an age where most times the brain seems to be not operating at all. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Especially if the (clears throat) old dog already knows a useless trick when he sees one.
All the books that tell you a Darlingon is just a pairing up of two transistors to get a multiplied gain are written by jerkfaces. But jerkfaces write a lot of books, indeed. I saw the setup and wondered right off, why not just build a bigger transistor? Or make all the Darlingtons you want without spending money on fancy chips? Now I know. The two transistors are not a matching pair, yet most available literature focuses on that pairing, which isn't the idea. Memorize the following, because without a lot of reading, you may never see this so clear in print again.
The first transistor is an ordinary switching transistor. They are called this because they are efficient at turning a current off and on depending on a sensitive "base". But they are not so great at supplying enough power because they get hot and burn out. If you don't believe me, touch one. However, the second transistor is a power transistor, designed to output plenty of power, plenty that is for a transistor. These are coupled so the switching transistor controls the power transistor. Simple, so why do all the books focus on the gain?
That happens because of shallow thinking. If you connect any two transistors together, the resulting amplification is the product [of their multiplicated HFe values]. And of course, that big number is all you should expect little boys to look at and say "Wow, man, like." When they later consider themselves experts and write a book, that's their mindset. This is the class of "nodders" who never ask questions or let others ask.
Arduino code. I'm back at it. This time focused on motor controls. I was fully expecting to find at Nova tonight that I would be the only one pursuing* this task. If anyone asks what the Nova bunch has done to actually learn about robots, the answer is not very much. A few brought Arduinos to the first few classes but quit when nobody used them. To date, the only known progress is the organizer bought a 3D printer for his house and brought in some finger parts for the boys to play with.
By comparison, we are miles ahead, and it is almost sad to say that is so in every area. Right here in my "trailer" are more Arduinos, gears, drill presses, drive chains, transistors, MOSFETS, research books, power supplies, H-bridges, breadboards, and far more of the paraphernalia needed to build anything worthwhile. I've done everything short of offering those guys free beer to colaborate on a bigger project where we learn things. But not even the Russian has ever shown a glimmer of interest.
Why attend? Because despite it all, Nova is still the only other place anywhere near that even claims to have an interest in robotics. And I noticed in since the last post, they changed the name back to robotics "and A.I." That has got to be totally the influence of that one pushy member who likes playing simulators on his laptop. Mark my words, they will put together their little plastic robot by-the-numbers hand and download their code. If you'll pardon the pun, on the other hand (get it), I will build a robot. Long before they get off their asses.
My coding has changed to an extent. I used to document and file all my code, it is stored on the back computer. I found that in years, I've never gone back to review or use it. At any given moment, only the leading edge of code for a current project has any relevance. So, rather than religiously keep all records, I may or may not keep old code.
Okay, this won't be on the exam, so consider it today's trivia. One forgotten aspect of the Darlington transistor is that Sidney Darlington was one of the first to realize transistors could be manufactured more than one to a package. But since his invention only had two, his patent lawyers only applied for that number. If they had done what he wanted, he would today be the richest man in the world a thousand times over, receiving a royalty on every integrated circuit made.
*Author's note: there is a motive here as well, but like most of my motives, they are hardly ulterior--they just happen to be very strong motives that some people are clueless enough miss in the first round. The fact is, Nova is likely doomed as a meetup because it is a waste of time for most people. Only the die-hards like myself have perfect attendance. That signifies at least some ambition.
If the group breaks up, I need to retain the lead in each of the robot disciplines. And I've noticed the others won't touch motor-controller code. If they had to, I mean really had to, build a robot today, they would have no choice but to invite me. That's common sense, Glenn. Thinking ahead doesn't automatically mean ulterior motive there either, dude.
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