It’s been a long time since my last update, and I figure I should post something. Hopefully updates will be more regular. I’ve had a few things I wanted to post on my blog, but I didn’t want to do it without posting a more comprehensive update, and didn’t really want to post a comprehensive update, so nothing got done. A deadlock so to speak. Anyways, I’ll start off with what’s happened to me since the last update.

I finally graduated from Sacramento State in December and got my Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. It was a lot of work, but in the end it was worth it. It wasn’t really all that difficult, just a lot of work. My aunt and cousin came out to Sacramento to watch me walk during the cerimony, which was actually relatively quick.

I’ve also just recently quit playing World of Warcraft. The expansion pack really killed the game for me, just a lot of work and not that much reward for doing it. I mean, it’s really just a giant treadmill to keep people entertained, but it wasn’t really entertaining anymore, so I’ve quit.

Last month I got a Nintendo Wii. After deciding I wanted to get one, it took a few weeks for me to finally find one. I ended up getting it at Wal-mart during their Sunday sale early in the morning. It’s a lot of fun to play, especially wii sports. I also got Zelda along with it, and later bought Paper Mario. Zelda wasn’t quite as fun as I was hoping for, and I haven’t beaten it yet. Paper mario was a lot of fun and I beat it in a few days, although there was way to much text for it in my opinion. It’s also a lot of fun to play wii sports on a giant projector, so if you ever get a chance to do that, you should.

It’s kind of nice being out of school, although that means that having a job is the next step. Initially I put my resume up on monster and contacted one company that did web applications in Davis, but I didn’t get chosen for the position. I also put my resume up on the Sacramento State Career site and got one interview from that; I didn’t really want to do what they offered, so I passed on that. I also went to the job fair at Sacramento State and got two interviews out of the process, although nothing panned out from that either (one was consulting and the other was mainly for an internship).

I was browsing the Career Newsletter at Sacramento State, and saw a position at Schilling Robotics in Davis. I had heard about Schilling from my friend Zach, who works there. I had been asking him when they were hiring computer science students and he said they weren’t. However, this posting was new so I talked to him about it, and he gave my resume to the right person, so I got a phone interview with their recruiter, then one with the person I would be working for, then finally an on-site interview with him and a few more people. Apparently I impressed them, as they offered me the position. I accepted, and I start May 7th. I’m really looking forward to it, because it is something new for me (as a job), to do more c++ work rather than web development. Also my experience with working on microcontrollers for doing robots will hopefully be useful in this job as well.

There are two big projects I’m working on this summer. The first is the one Joe is more excited about doing, the “Defconbot” as we call it. Basically the goal is to make an autonomous robot that will shoot down white targets against a black wall. Joe is somewhat involved with helping out on the software side (he really wants to make ‘cool’ drawing for the targetting), although he is primarily doing all of the design and fabrication of the robot itself. For the gun, we bought an air compressor and are essentially making a blow gun. The plastic BB’s will be loaded into a barrel, and compressed air will force it out of the barrel. The major mechanical point will be the feeder to get a single BB into the barrel at a time, and the valve to control when the air is on (as we don’t want to waste air). Currently we’re using an air sprayer as a valve to do the hand-testing, but ideally it will be some sort of electric valve, rather than something we make ourselves.

I’m mainly working on the software side of the project, since my mechanical & electrical engineering skills aren’t as great as his, and I’m a much better programmer than him, and a cooler guy in general too. I wrote some software in C# that grabs the video stream from a webcam, detects the objects, and also some software that controls servos using the serial port. This will be used to aim the gun at the targets. The two pieces currently aren’t hooked up together yet, as we don’t have two servos powerful enough to hold the gun yet. However, here is a screenshot for those that are interested:

The second project we’re working on is our 30 pound combat robot named “Big Bloom.” The concept is that it will spin in a circle using two wheels, and brake them at certain points in time so that it creates a translation across the arena when we want it to move. It is going to be controlled using bluetooth, and I have a few videos to show the progress on this. As usual, I’m doing the software side and he’s doing the mechanical/electrical. Anyways, the first video is the initial test of getting the wireless signal to the microcontroller (using bluetooth). The second is similar to the first, only I have it controlling motors as well. The last video is a small prototype I made a long time ago to see if the motion is possible, and how difficult it is to do. It basically just goes in a straight line, then stops, then goes in another straight line — this is all controlled by timers, so there’s no remote control.

Control Prototype v1:

Control Prototype v2:

Motion Prototype:

I’m dissapointed that Bush won the election yesterday. I am not scared or worried or anything else that other people may say. We already have suffered through four years of his terrible administration. He lies to us. He thinks he’s better than us. I’m disappointed that people think that Bush is “saving” our country for terror. Someone said to me, “how could anyone vote for Kerry after 9/11?” How could anyone vote for Bush after what Bush has done after 9/11 would be my response, but I wasn’t witty enough to come up with that before he walked out of the room. I’m dissapointed that a record number of people turned out to vote for Bush because of this. I’m dissapointed that we didn’t have anyone good to vote for as well. I’m dissappointed that Diebold machines were allowed to tabulate votes this election; without paper trails, with secret keypresses that allow people to manipulate the voting records, without any sort of audit system. I had a nice quote to post, but it seems I’ve already said it.

One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that.

(emphasis mine. courtesy: electoral-vote.com)

I don’t want to speculate that there was any sort of fraud or foul play, but it certainly seems like it. CNN conveniently changed their exit poll numbers late on the night of the election to match what the Diebold machines were spitting out. I’m also dissapointed that 11 states passed measures banning civil unions and/or marraiges for homosexuals. So much for equal rights. I shouldn’t be too dissappointed though — California passed the same bill four years ago (I voted against it in the first election I was eligable though, so don’t blame me). There is a lot to be dissapointed for.

On a happier note, I released an update for poker saver today. So go check it out if you play poker.

I got to looking at my notes file for stuff to put in my blog from the last entry and I noticed that a) there’s a lot of stuff there, and b) it’s been almost 2 months since I’ve made a serious blog post. I suppose now is a good time as any to do.

School has started during the interim. Parking was only bad for the first week thankfully, and not near as it has been in previous semesters. I’m taking 5 classes this semester, and would probably be taking 6 if the last class wasn’t at 7-8:30pm. I got all of the ones I wanted for the most part. These include Math 110B (Algebra of some kind), Math 170 (Linear Programming), CSC 134 (Database/File Systems), CSC 196L (Artificial Intelligence), and History 17B (American: Civil War to present). I look forward to going to the AI class since it’s the most interesting of them and the projects are fun to do. The last one was implementing a program that used a minimax game tree to play a game called ‘Pawn Stop’ that the teacher invented. My program plays pretty strong and I hope to win the tournament he set up for it next week.

During summer I accomplished a goal I set to read the Xanth series over again. During the first week of school I was finishing up the last book of it (Up in a Heaval), that are in paperback at least. All 25 books of the series. That and reading I, Robot and On a Pale Horse, I had a lot of book reading that I did. I guess I made up for all the years I didn’t read at all unless I had to during junior high and high school. I’ve toned it down since school started and have only read Masters of Doom since then, which I’d recommend for anyone to read. I’ve also ordered a couple books to read in the future, which should be here this week hopefully.

My dad came in town for my birthday last week and we did a lot of things while he was here. First we went to Nationals in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun since I wasn’t a competetor at it and could just watch and relax. There were a lot of good fights during it and lots of carnage. My only complaint would be the inconsiderate people that were in the stands. Mostly people who let their kids do whatever they wanted which usually involved hanging on the bleachers and bumping into me and trying to push me out of the way. One parent had the audacity to tell their child not to get stepped on (implying that me, who hadn’t even moved a leg for at least 5 minutes when his kid crowded into a space next to me that didn’t exist). Another person literrally sat on top of the bag that was next to my dad that had his camera in it (there wasn’t that much space between him and the next person either!). Luckily the competitors are much better people than this, at least from what I’ve noticed.

My birthday came during the week and I couldn’t go to a traditional Black Angus dinner like usual, and instead just went to Baker’s Square for a lunch. I got a watch for my birthday, which I wanted to have since I don’t really like pulling my cell phone out of my pocket to see the time, and it’s akward to be without the time when I forget to charge my phone. I also got a 160gb hard drive that I haven’t gotten around to installing yet. I’d kind of like to build an SATA raid array, so I might use this for my pvr instead, although I’m almost out of space on my desktop hard drive.

On Friday we went to see Team America: World Police. It was pretty funny, especially the Team America theme song when they bust out of Mount Rushmore, and Kim Song-Il or whatever his name was talking in general. They sure get the Asian stereotype down :).

On Sunday we went to the Sacbots event at CSUS, “Smackdown in Sactown,” as it was dubbed. I arrived a little later than I would’ve liked, since I had wrote a program to handle the brackets and display everything on the projector screen so that it was easier for competetors and the audience to see what was going on instead of having things mysteriously happen with brackets posted on a wall somewhere. There were a few hangups with getting the program working since I couldn’t seem to get apache running on my laptop (it was working fine on my desktop). I ended up running it remotely over the internet. A second thing was that my digital camera was taking pictures significantly larger than the pictures I was using to test out the program, so my computer nearly locked up every time it tried to render everything. I ended up turning off images and running it without them until the break and then scaled them down using a program Joe recommended and uploaded them to the program. It worked great after that, and people even complimented me on it :).

Since I entered a robot into the event, my dad handled getting the bot ready to fight, which was pretty nice because I was handling the bracket system and never had to worry about my bot since he took care of it. I did pretty well this event. Upon Steve’s (Fusible Link) advice, I ran copal 50:1 motors at 22.2V using two 3-cell LiPoly batteries connected in series. Coincidentally, my first fight was against him. However, he has since upgraded to the mythical maxon 17:1 motors which are impossible to get anymore and was much faster than I was. Much faster. He beat me pretty handedly. After that I fought Wild One and won in a record 7 seconds (he said one of his motors wasn’t working). Then I fought Shark Bait and won, and then beat Hurricane. I don’t remember the details of either fight, other than I won. Then I fought Havok and lost. His drum didn’t really do much damage to me, but it had enough oomph to lift me up in the air a little bit throwing off my traction. I kept trying to get him towards the pit but in the end he caught onto me and pushed me in instead. Oh well, 3-2 is a good record for me, since I would’ve been going against Grilled Fajitas next (Ross Hironaka’s Flamethrower), which is a really good robot and ended up getting fourth place, losing to his other robot, Mean Burrito (also a flame thrower). Here are thebrackets of the entire tournament, along with pictures.

Finally, I’d like to pimp out a few programs I use regularly. Firefox web browser, which is a much better program than Internet Explorer in that it has much better security, more features (tabbed browsing, find toolbar, popup blocking), and I like it better. Also is HydraIRC, which is a better IRC client than mIRC in my opinion. It is much better looking and seems to be faster and more responsive in general. It lacks some things like scripting, but other than that it has more features like the channel monitor and docking tabs. Also the channel list is much better because it’s a tree instead of just a list and that makes it much easier to be on multiple IRC networks/channels compared to mIRC.

It looks like spammers have been using spam bots and putting their web page in my referer thing.. That has to go so I’m going to remove it. Sorry to all the folks that liked it (I liked it mainly).

Also, Poker Saver alpha 02 is coming along nicely for those of you that are interested. Also, I’ve got all the parts for FryDrumBot, including the aluminum tube, but I’m not sure if it’ll be the one I’ll use. Currently it’s 3″ diameter, 1/8″ wall, and 1.77oz per lineal inch. The electronics weigh 6oz, and the two endcaps weigh 2oz total, and the wheels weigh 2oz total, so that leaves 6oz for the drum, stabalizers and chassis mounts, which isn’t quite enough. I may end up buying a thinner wall for half the weight (but less momentum), or a smaller diameter which will cut down on the weight of the endcaps as well.

I’ve put up a small utitlity just now to calculate odds and the required pot size for calling bets. You can go to it by visiting the link to it on the right. I’ve also added a link (unworking) to the site I’ve just registered, pokersaver.com. I plan to use it to write a c# program similar to Poker Tracker but more extensive than it, including tracking for games other than hold-em. Originally it started as writing a web-based application with a game playback feature, but after creating the database for it and everything I decided that there’s too much data being sent to make it feasable for a web application. Mainly it’s because the software is $70, and I think I can write something better than it. Only time will tell.

As an aside, I’ve recently purchased Programming C# by Jesse Liberty and published by O’reilly to help me learn C# enough to do this project. It seems like it’s geared for people with a lot less programming experience than I have though, so I don’t know if I’d reccomend it to other experienced programmers. It definately has a lot of information in it though.

For robot updates, I’ve bought makings for another robot, which is going to tentatively be called FryDrumBot, which won’t be anythin like anything I’ve seen as an antweight, and hopefully it’ll be good too :). Also, I’ve got plans for FryBot 3.0. Basically, it’s going to be the same as FryBot 2.0, except with wedges built into it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the pneumatics kit right now though. Maybe I’ll make a third robot or find a way to fit it into FryBot 3.0 :). I’m going to be working on my robot history page today, so it shows history of my robots.