I know, I’m terrible at keeping up to date on these blog posts. What usually happens is there’s something I want to post but don’t want to take the time to do it right now and it gets permanently stuck in my queue of stuff to do. Then I want to post about something else but don’t want to go out of order. Then it gets to be 9 months later and I post a large backlog of things. This is another one of those posts.

After Defcon and Robogames last year, Joe and I were pretty tired of working on projects so we took some time off to do some non-project related things. It’s a lot easier to get projects done when you’re in college and only have to be at school 15-20 hours a week versus having full time job and obligated for 40+ hours a week. However, it’s also nice being able to afford things rather than being stuck with a shoestring budget. I guess it’s the old catch-22 of having enough time or enough money, never both.

To celebrate my minimum spare time, I decided to remake the Tournament Software I use to run the robot tournaments with WPF (instead of PHP). The initial reasoning behind doing it in PHP was that was what I was most familiar with and that I wanted people in the pits to be able to look at the brackets, etc over wi-fi without having to bug me. However, that aspect never got used and the software was hard to work with if there was any problem whatsoever (entered match wrong, or someone shows up late). I’ve wanted to learn WPF for a while, and this was a good excuse to have a project to do that with.

The new program is a lot easier to run, and the data is a lot more manageable. As a first WPF project it turned out pretty good, even though I’m not doing enough stuff the “WPF way” and didn’t accomplish all of the goals I had for it, namely the ability to integrate in with video mixing software so that the matches could be recorded and high-quality overlays for who’s fighting and who’s next. I must say though, WPF is nice, and LINQ is even better.

I used the software successfully at the CSUS event “Smackdown in Sactown” in April, and again at Robogames in June after making a few changes to support multiple brackets, among other things. Joe and I were kind of burned out of combat robots, so we didn’t enter any. Both Emsee Fry Pants and Big Bloom were out of commission, and we didn’t want to rebuild them.

Instead of working on another combat robot, we decided to focus our efforts on this years Defcon robot. We decided that it would be a good fit to have the shooting gallery event from Defcon at Robogames and suggested it to Judge Dave. He agreed and we decided to host the event by making the arenas for it and organizing the matches. Unfortunately, in doing so, we ran out of time to finish the gun before Robogames. Instead of doing a half-assed job with the arena and the gun, we decided that it would be better just to get the arena built properly and relax a little bit on the weeked, so we ended up just hosting the event and not competing in it.

Part of the problem with the gun is we got a late start on the design process. We are trying to address all of the problems from last years gun, and the biggest one was inaccurate pan/tilt. To address this, we bought some stepper motors to replace the servos. The second was the cardboard facade, which is being addressed by a frame made of a non-cardboard material. The manufacturing of the frame was delayed a while, and by the time the pan/tilt was fully assembled, there was only a few weeks left until the competition. And then there was still the matter of creating another custom hopper for firing and mounting all of the electronics. All of the delays added up to us not finishing it by Robogames. However, it gave us a big head start instead of doing the same thing before Defcon. And believe me when I say it, this years gun will be really impressive.

However, in the mean time, we decided to do a smaller projects with less pressure. One of which is a autonomous slot car. Basically it is a car that can decide for itself how fast to go around the track based on an accelerometer measuring the cornering g-force. Joe sent of a while ago to have a pcb made for it, and after diagnosing and fixing a problem on it (the transistor was in the wrong place) got it working. This last weekend we took it down to Fast Track Hobby and tested it out to see how well it worked. For the initial prototype, we decided it would only react to changes and see how well it worked. As it turns out, the car needs to be able to memorize the course and be able to react before the course changes (or add a camera and detect it early; the former sounds easier though). It was able to successfully navigate the track without flying off and slowing down on the corners and speeding up on the straightaways, however we needed to turn the max speed down in order to have it not fly off on the first sharp corner after a long straightaway. We took some pictures of the course and the autonomous slot car, as well as some video:

On another weekend, we decided to measure how fast Joe’s Corvette was by creating a G-Meter. Instead of creating something fancy, we decided to just use the sample development board for the development kit we got for free (plus shipping and handling) for a freescale microcontroller that happened to have an accelerometer on it. I created a quick application in WPF on his laptop that parsed the serial data that it was sending and displayed it in a few hours, and we took it out for a spin on the freeways to see what it could do.

I’ve also been listening to podcasts in my car in my commute. Some of the podcasts I listen to are TWiT, .Net Rocks! and NPR’s Science Friday. In fact, one of my comments to .NET rocks was read on the show and I got a free mug from it. It’s a nice big mug too, that can hold a lot of tea. For those that are coming to this blog from the show, I’ve done more robots than just the sentry gun below. Also I’ve been listening to audio books from Audible (one of TWiT’s sponsors). Specifically the one I read (or listened to, rather) was The Time Traveler’s Wife. It was a really good listen, and I hear they are making a movie based on it which I’d be curious to see how it turns out. At least Will Smith isn’t in it, since he has a good habit of being in movies that bastardize the originals they are based on (iRobot, I am legend, Wild Wild West, and to some degree Hancock) and make them into more mainstream movies but missing out on the point of the originals. One of the problems with listening to audio books though is getting behind in the podcasts.  That book was 18 hours worth, and it caused me to get around 2 weeks behind. With taking a day of vacation and 2 sick days off between then and now, it’s made catching that much harder.

This is the end of my catchup post. I’ve created a Twitter account that I’ve updated somewhat more frequently than this blog. You can follow me on Twitter, and maybe some day I’ll get popular and catch up to Kevin Rose. I could also win the lottery and become a super-millionaire.

Also, I’m hosting some videos from Robogames 2008 on my website. Right now it’s mainly high-speed (aka slow motion, like they do on MythBusters), but the compilations on the bottom right are pretty good.

I feel bad waiting so long to update this page, but I’m lazy. So sue me. It’s not like
anyone reads this anyways.

Finals are done, and that means school is done too. When I started writing this, I had
just finished school, but now it’s a few weeks later and I’ve already got my grades back.
It was a fun semester and fairly easy because 3 of the classes (MATH 108, CS 028, and PHIL 060)
were very similar to each other, with each going over most of the same stuff at the
beginning as general knowledge and branching off to their respective areas for more detail
with MATH 108 going into more detail on proof, and then set notation and then more
detail on functions. And then CS 028 going into a tiny bit of set notation followed by
computer science related concepts like logic circuits, and recursive functions, and
langauges (i.e. regular expressions, finite automata, and grammars). However, PHIL 060
didn’t seem to go any furthur. It seemed the entire class was learned the first 3 weeks
in MATH 108, but with different symbols. MATH 102 was fairly easy because I had already
read a book about Number Theory before, and it was much similar although I didn’t understand
the book and taking the class made me understand it much better. CS 130 was also an easy
class because I had read The
Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena, which is very in depth and the CS 130
class was a subset of the book. I was actually surprised that the class didn’t go farther
into detail on problems like NP-complete, and things like that. If you care about the
teachers I had, I thought Taylor (MATH 108) was a really good and entertaining teacher,
although I’m sure the dynamics of the other students in the class helped with that. Also
she gave good lectures, but I’ve heard that she’s hard (I didn’t really think so though).
Krovetz (CS 028) was very organized and a good teacher overall.

One thing I thought was interesting about CSUS was I thought I might see some people I
haven’t seen since high school, since I went to American River while most of the other
people in my class went either to Sierra or directly to CSUS. The whole semester I
didn’t see a single person from my High School at the college. I only saw one person from
American River that I had in a couple math classes there. Other than that, I did see someone
working at a place I regularly go to for food that went to High School with me (and I like
to think we were friends). Perhaps next semester will be better.

I finally got my PVR set up, and I ended up moving it into my room without a network cable.
My dad brought some long rolls of cable from Utah that don’t have ends on them, so I’ll
need to get some connectors the device that crimps them and feeds the wires in. I also
had to get a Svideo -> RCA connector at Radio Shack for $20 (wow!) since HSC didn’t have
any, and I didn’t want to make one myself. It actually works pretty good now that we
get more channels through Comcast since they converted service in our area (again), so
I’m really only missing out on Tech TV, a few others, and the movie channels without making
the IR blaster.

I’ve also been working on a new map, which I’ve tentatively called fry_laser2k3. Basically
the intentions of it were to make a 9on9 version of fry_laser, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do have all the gameplay additions without making the map too unbalancing for
offense or defense. It’s shaping up pretty well, with having almost all of the base
constructed except for the spawn, and potentially another small “buffer” room. So really
just the midfield and cloning the bases after that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Note: this was written on May 5th, but not uploaded until June 2nd
While browsing the infamous “Information Superhighway,” I thought about visiting
wilwheaton.net (one l, yes I know), so I did.
Wil Wheaton is the guy that played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation
if you didn’t know. Anyways, I remember seeing him on an episode of
The Screen Savers, and he was a really good host.
So I’ve tried to visit his site more often since he seems pretty interesting. I’ve thought
about sending him a fan mail, but I don’t want to have him have to bother with yet another
piece of it. Perhaps I should since I’ve started using Outlook Express instead of Eudora so that
I could try out the encryption stuff, and he requests that you send signed mail so that
it won’t automagically get put in the spam bin along with the requests to give you larger
and firmer breasts. I know I want some of those!

Back to the point. While I was at his site, I read about how he was publishing a new book
and wanted to know what the best way to advertise. Anyways he mentioned about reading an
article on kuro5hin entitled Tip Jar as a Revenue Model.
I read the article and it seemed pretty interesting. I do agree that it doesn’t seem like a
good way to get a lot of money compared to actually getting books published in “dead-tree
format” as he calls it, and that he probably got a lot more money than normally would be
generated because of how many people gave him money simply for being one of the first
people to try the method. I don’t want to repeat the article, so just go ahead and read
it yourself if you’re interested.

He put up the article not to give a plug out to his book, but I was interested since he said
that almost everyone that commented on the content of the book thought it was good. I don’t
think that he would be he would lie like that to generate revenue since you don’t have to
pay for anything if you don’t like it, so I did a little bit of sniffing around to find out
where it was and ended up reading the first three chapters before I went to bed and then read
the rest in the morning. In my opinion it’s a really good read, and I put $5 into his “tip
jar” via paypal. I’ll probably even buy a copy of the printed copy if it ever gets published
on say amazon.

PVR Update: I got mythtv working again on my new mobo but I still
can’t get the on-board video card working properly (it’s an s3 prosavage ddr). I ordered a
new GeForce2 MX with tv-out and it should be here within the week and then I’ll be able to
watch the stuff I’ve recorded. I’ve mainly recorded stuff on commercial tv because I haven’t
made the IR Blaster to control the DirecTV receiver I have. Actually my dad will probably
make it for me and ship it to me since he’s much better at making things than I am. I don’t
want to fry my motherboard :). Also the other thing I’ll need to get is an svideo to RCA
adapter/cable since I don’t have svideo on my tv or vcr which kind of sucks. Hopefully I’ll
have it done soon though.

I’m actually also thinking about swapping motherboards with the PVR box because it has 6 USB
slots and my computer only has 4, but I don’t know if the A7M266 board will support the
Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, or if the PVR box even needs the extra oomph of it and can settle with
my 1.333GHz Thunderbird processor. I really ought to put a comment box down here again so
I can get feedback on the stuff I write.

Finally, a class was cancelled at CSUS. It’s been 2/3 of an entire semester with 5 classes
and only 1 cancelled so far. When I was going to ARC, I could look forward to several missed
classes per semester :). Oh well, I got to go to work for an extra two hours and made some
extra money.

While I was at work, I bought a motherboard and a processor (AMD XP 1800+) with my employee
discount for the PVR box (mentioned below). I got home and assembled it using the
case from my
old computer. So far I haven’t turned
it on yet because of the shelf (mentioned below) made it hard to plug in cables, so I’m
waiting to get some more free time and run it in the other room.

Well, it’s been over a month since my last update, and a decent amount of stuff has
happened since then, I just haven’t gotten around to updating this page yet. So, in
a pseudo-random order, here’s my recent history.

car alarm
While my dad was here, he also put in my car alarm for me since I’m not very good at wiring
things, not to mention my innate fear of getting electromocuted. I managed to be little more
than a peanut gallery while he was hooking up all the stuff. We still need to buy some relays
so that I can have it trip my door-locks remotely too, but my dad is convinced that the simple
solution for attaching the relays to the circuit won’t work, so I’m not going to doubt him.
I’ve scanned the picture of the circuit so if anyone has any ideas on how to hook it up,
let me know. Here is the picture. Thanks in advance :).
It’s also the first time that my new car has been apart, so it was neat looking the way it
was made.

new shelf
Also while he was here, he put a shelf up for my computer. It makes it much more convenient
for my desk situation because it literally doubles the space I have. Now I can put my laptop
on the desk as well as my monitor and mouse for my desktop. Too bad the only linux drivers for
my 802.11b card
are Red Hat only binaries and I’ve got
Slackware on the router box I’d put it in. No amount of
fidgiting would make that one work.

update: pictures
1
2
3

custom pvr box
I’ve wanted to get a Tivo for a long time, but I’ve never really wanted to pay so much to
buy one and then have to pay a monthly subscription. At $250 for the 40 hour one, plus $250
more for a lifetime (for the box) subscription, it’s much more economical to build a computer
myself and run my own software on it. Not to mention it will have a lot more features like
net connectivity, and not having to plug the phone line into it. The only thing it wouldn’t
have is the ability to tune two channels at once with directv like the directivo can.
I browsed the net for software that I could use, and I’ve settled on running
mythtv. So last Monday (April 14th),
I got a 200 gig hard drive from fry’s electronics (I had the
name before they bought out Incredible Universe!) and put it in my current 1.333ghz desktop,
removed unplugged the other hard drives, and then installed Debian
on it. It took me a while to get the graphic drivers working for my geforce4 ti4200 after
finally downloading the kernel source and recompiling since Debian Woody ships with a
kernel compiled by an old version of gcc. Then it’s a long time getting the sound drivers
working for the onboard sound on my ASUS A7M266. In the meantime I went to Best Buy and got
a tuner card
(coincidentally enough it’s the same one the author of mythtv got) and managed to get the
drivers working for that thing. Finally, after turning off the KDE sound manager server,
I was able to get the sound recording working through the program. So now it’s a week later,
and I let it run and had it record a bunch of shows while I went to school+work. I plan on
reinstalling linux when I get the final box since I only partitioned it with 137 gigs since
that’s how much it recognized without the ATA100 drivers. I don’t think I like Debian that
much, so I’m probably going to put Slackware on it instead, although one of my co-workers says
I should put a “real” operating system on it like Red Hat or SuSe. I might contemplate Red
Hat, to get the wireless card working in it, although I’ve heard lots of bad things about it.

Anyways, that should be everything important that I’m willing to spill on this web page.
Hopefully I won’t forget to update (or be lazy and just not do it) so much and maybe more
frequent updates in the future :).