One year ago today: August 3, 2013, old one-liners.
Five years ago today: August 3, 2009, predicting $4 bread.
Ten years ago today: August 3, 2004, space pen (interesting).
What’s this, a cold spell in Australia? Makes sense, with the global warming, all the cold has to go somewhere. And I don’t know about the safety of marijuana. Wherever you legalize it for medical use, you get that huge outbreak of glaucoma. It’s amazing I’m in a good mood after using the city bus to get back to the scooter. It is an electrical problem, and phooey on anyone who thinks that makes things any easier over here. And the bus can be eight minutes early or late, making them very easy to miss. Both ways.
I had to spend what little of my time was left finding why all my electrical gear quite working at once. Well, not all of it, but more than should go wrong. It seems completely chance. Here is a loose wire in my Honda booster pack. It is now crimped, bolted, and soldered in place. With electrical solder, the hot kind. That can drop a bead on your sneaker, burn a pilot hole and still inflict a painful first degree burns right through your sock.
The vocalist is beginning to suspect the band moving toward a more modern and popular show may not be totally a natural occurrence. She also indicated an interest in playing rhythm guitar. I was right on top of that one, I would prance like a lord to have a duo with an attractive lady singer who played a rhythm instrument. And pray tell, who is the expert at teaching rhythm guitar players? We would be an ideal match for the Florida lounge circuit, or what’s left of it. I’d have plenty of completion—from guitar players. And she’s more than once stated she prefers “intellectual” men. Do you know of any?
Once more, the guitar player choses a new tune without scrutinizing the bass part. I again caution the reader that other than those I name, I am NOT criticizing any guitar player personally. My target is the mammoth ego trip that is going on in total. This time it is a Neil Diamond song, “Sweet Caroline”, and old Neil learned early to hire the very best bass player he could find. I recall a later recording of that song released in the late 80s. That bass line is a knockout, you wonder if you just heard it right. And guess which version I’m going to find and learn?
[Author's note 2015-08-03: I was correct about the band, they have no intention of changing to some formula that works. Sad, because they have put monumental effort into creating a band that will never go anywhere. Not even take-up gigs at the Legion hall. When I want to be heard, I have to say something to the singer and hope she will repeat it later. Also, the premise that this band had places to work was false. I would not join a band that had no prospects of playing, so don't go saying I got the wrong impression. The band is changing, but it is taking too long.]
I worked on the scooter. It is not the fuel pump. Miguelito replaced a mysterious rotor part a few months ago, the one that has no moving parts but still wears out. It works on inductance. I will have to wheel the scooter over to the Cuban shop since I can’t wait for Miguelito to return. Now, working on the scooter attracts a running commentary from all the nearby men, most of whom have never owned a scooter. “Must be your PNN valve.”
I can’t talk “mechanic” talk, but I know a good tale from the trailer court when I hear one. Charlie, the oldest bartender in town, told me a classic. When he was up in Tennessee in the 70s, his new truck ran out of gas. He towed it to the station, filled up, and it still would not start. So he had it towed 270 miles home, cost him a paycheck. It was a Ford. Have you guessed it? Two gas tanks, with the cut-over switch hidden under the seat. He’d filled the wrong tank.
Next, taking inventory of robotics parts, I found complete, but unassembled, kits of beautiful motor control circuits, memory shields (shields are a type of board that “clips” on top of your control circuit to provide specific functions), and more Arduinos. Hmmm, we may now have more Arduinos than the combined Nova contingent. We have determined that the most the others will do is download and run preexisting code samples off the ‘Net. The tip-off? Six months after our first meetup, most of their Arduinos are still in the shipping containers.
One of the items, the motor controller, is discontinued. Hmmm, the replacement model has a separate serial latch, while ours in onboard. There is limited space inside the robot housing. Think about it. To move a thumb, the motor has to be near the thumb, not located in the chest where a complicated connection setup would be required. Will we share all this inside knowledge? Certainly, as soon as the club elects me president.
Any robot by this club will be dominated by the Arduino. The other controllers don’t have the support base. The unwelcome part is the degenerate code used by the Arduino, the C+ language. It abuses punctuation, allows local variables on the fly, and it is impossible to tell subroutines from obscure commands. Worse, the code is heavily dependent on downloaded “libraries” meaning the command structure is constantly changing. Not evolving, but like Windows, changing.
Riding the bus means I had extra hours to read up on Arduino. The Nova people will probably download the code. I looked at the raw procedures and subroutines. Somehow, I don’t think much more that the basics are going to get covered. Another revelation is that there is no friendly way to have a robot display status or environmental readings. You’d think by now the electronics design teams would make a single, programmable, unit that can be coded to display ordinary numbers. Nope.
And sorry, no pics (it was raining) but what an bizarre lighting storm tonight. Not the flash and crack-boom, but a lighting bolt that jabbed as something and stayed on it for several seconds. The strikes were over along the Atlantic coast, a mile east of my route. How strange to see a hit, then watch the bolt keep changing shape but stay jolting a single target for two or three seconds. Take that!
ADDENDUM
Totally electronics, but read on. I’m still learning so we can work together. I built the motor controller kit, which took three hours. Much longer than it said in the manual. Why? Same reason as kits from day one—poor instructions. This unit was from Adafruit, which you can probably pronounce any way you want. This outfit has great on-line instructions but suffer from the same you’re-supposed-to-know syndrome on the very fine details. Like, “solder all the headers in place” is not the same as telling you that half of them have to be first turned upside down.
I know three hours is too long to stay on one project, but of all the crazy incidents, a code word (not English) came through telling me to wait for an important message. Turned out to be a totally random typo. I waited here working until 2:28PM before I caught on. Edison said it right, “All things come to he who busts his ass while he waits.”
Surprises? Yes indeed. The finished product is surprisingly heavy, over a half pound. And, look again, the IC (integrated circuit) chips are not yet installed. Our club (not Nova), has always accepted the extra expense of using sockets on every circuit board. But the weight is something you should experience yourself. The weight and strength of even a small robot would likely amaze most. This circuit is a more sophisticated H-bridge.
Sophisticated? Yes. A regular H-bridge reverses the current direction to control the motor roll. However, we are not only adding speed control, the signals are digital. Hence, the three chips on the board. Two motor controllers (of two motors each, total four motors, think why) and a chip to interpret that digital input from the Arduino. You can imagine how far ahead of the pack this puts us.
And to maintain that lead, there is the programming to make it work. That third chip has to take a serial stream of input (the only kind the Arduino can send) and chop it into “pieces of eight”, that is into 8-byte bits. These are then sent at once (as a parallel unit) to the output pins, which we now have learned to control individually. Think of it as squeezing the last ounce of performance out of expensive chips that by design, would otherwise average 50% idle time.
In other words, we’ve learned the serial to parallel conversion chips must “latch” (when turned on, it stays on no matter how many times the switch if flipped). A perpetual problem with controllers is running out of pins. We’ve learned to “double up” pins which involves more code, but code is cheap. Components are not.
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