What are my projects

freedom3d

Learning how to use behaviors. Have a little test using sketchflow.

imu demo

Getting data back from the imu. Learning to use the new .net tasks for use in other projects.

alibre ax-12 biped

Two parallel link sections operational, but really that nice.

shapemaniac iphone
It's in alpha.

stepper motor driver
AVR environment all ready. Motors ordered.

cnc conversion

Cleaned and oiled everything. 2-axis table sitting under my desk.

iButterToast in Washington Times

I never posted a link to this. Here it is..

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/26/some-iphone-apps-may-be-offbeat-but-thats-by-desig/print/

Clothing pressure sensors

Anti-patent.

I'm think that instead of putting pressure sensors on the robot itself that it might be a better idea to put them in ( probably padded ) clothing and shoes. The clothes and shoes do not need to be tight fitting, but tight enough to stay mostly in the same relative place to the skeleton.

For calibration you could have the robot touch itself all over ( while playing that song. ) That will give the location of the sensors as well as a calibration of their sensitivity.

One advantage of doing things this way is that it self-organizes the huge mess of sensor wires and provides a nice way for you to remove them as a whole easily. Which is nice for maintenance and testing.

wpf VisualStateManager.GoToState not working

I'll save you the 3 hours and tell you the answer.

It just does not work if you throw a bunch of controls into a Window. You have to add stuff into a UserControl ( maybe something else works too. ) With a Window the GoToStateAction behavior works just fine to confuse you, but if you try to call GoToState from code it just does nothing. Changing to a UserControl makes it work from code.

LAME.

more robots

ok. I thought about it. It is going to be too difficult to give my biped project up. Maybe if I figured out a way to not have such a horrible work area I could deal with it. I really try. I have like a million storage boxes, but I never get anywhere. I just don't have enough physical space. 16x12 in a crappy basement is just too small. Maybe I could build a shed for a few things and transform my garage into a workspace. It'd be super cold in the winter though and frozen hands are one of my major complaints with the basement. Frozen hands messing around with metal sounds worse than frozen hands typing.

no more robot building

I'm thinking of abandoning my biped project. In so many ways the biped project is just perfect for me. I have so many relevant skills already and the missing skills ( machining and electronics ) are things that I am very interested in getting good at.

The problem is I am super demotivated. The usual. Everytime I have a little time and start working I immediately get this feeling of not having enough time to do shit. Today I realized something that just compounds the problem..

I hate owning stuff. The less stuff to own the better. However.. Machining and electronics are not exactly something you can do with that attitude. You have to have tons of shit. I'm going to need to get tons more shit.

I can still play with robots and leverage my programming and problem solving skills. I probably should just not scratch build them. Buy not Build.

Which sucks.

Slowing down

So iphone Shapemaniac should of already been released for a month. It's still close like it has been, but still not ready. In the time I've had to work on it I've been in ship-it mode. Working on this iphone stuff has taught me how to be in ship-it mode a lot better. If you spent a shit ton of time on a project and it does poorly then that is not going to be very motivating. However.. That does not really lend to quality and poor quality is also not very motivating.

So the new plan ( yeah shutup ) is going to be to slow down and get out of ship-it mode ( mostly ) and focus more on quality. Kinda counter-intuitive since I have very limited time. However the hope is that in my very limited time I should at least be motivated to work and maybe focusing more on quality can help with that.

( Of course I could just be bored with the last couple things and this is just an excuse to get myself out of being bored. )

Semi-related rambling..
Over on braidgame.com the ad has some text that reads, "Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler." I like that. That is a lot of work and I appreciate that. There are definitely some filler puzzles in Shapemaniac especially after the auto piece culling that happens to make things fit on the smaller iphone screen. The problem is that I don't have a good way of editing the puzzles AND getting that data back into the pipeline. Editing is easy. The game basically is a simple editor. To get the data out is an annoying manual process. This is somewhat holding me back from shipping because there are several puzzles that really suck after culling and I have to build some shitty extra tools just to fix those damn puzzles. With my new slowdown mindset I think I might actually fix them.

Bigger bots easier

I was thinking that my earlier post with the idea of a bigger bot being easier to construct because torque to weight ratios increased with size was bullshit, but it might be true. Torque is linear with lever length. Double the length, double the needed torque. For some insane reason I had it stuck in my head that it was squared ( I now present you my physics card in shame. ) Everything is damn squared in the world after all.

What does work against you though is centripetal effects, but the torque to weight advantage might just eat those.

So yeah. I should be building the 1M bot I want to make. Maybe bigger. Asimo is 1.3M and is targeted towards helping shorter Japanese people. Maybe I should go 1.5M. How awesome would that be!

Sorry for the RSS spam

I switched over to hosting on the blogger domain instead of z425 and apparently to them that means I want every one of my posts ( for a year or so ) to be reclassified as a new post. Go Blogger.