The small lab assistant and I tackled the robot arm project last weekend. Fifty percent of team swan tron embarked upon the assembly phase wearing bunny slippers…
We did this in two big chunks, due to attention span limitations and nap purposes.
Testing Phase 1)
Testing Phase 2)
Emma figured out the remote pretty quickly, especially considering she has interfaced nearly exclusively with touch screen UIs. That may be next, in a round-about way. I’d like to stick some rPi brains in this and build a web UI, so the small assistant can run this with a phone or tablet. We’ll see where we end up with this.
The upgrades to my machines were simple, but significant issues arose in updating from 12.04 to 12.10 and from 12.10 to 13.4. The former was mainly in ’not compiling video card drivers’ and the later was primarily pertaining to neglecting Dell’s primary Wi-Fi drivers. I went manual and had boxes that were mostly functional, but decided to roll the dice on fresh installs…which, predictably, worked well. That gut feeling in doing something of that nature is very Window-y, and I don’t like it one bit. In short, poorly played by Ubuntu. It might be time to get some real QA going on these upgrades…I spent enough time researching this stuff to be upset, and I debug issues similar to this professionally. There was a ton of noise on forums, so it is safe to assume the user base was significantly disheartened by this process. On the flip side, 13.04 is slick…Unity is improved a ton…all of that. The marketing is not cool, and I’d be better off with pure Debian if this wasn’t one of my hobbies. Worst upgrade of all time, but still something I look forward to and will likely do again. D+
Red Bull’s concept was simple and brilliant…the accepted applicants were given custom Arduino shields, a whole bunch of LEDs, and a path to a git repo containing a library with which to make them crank. That, about four weeks, and a nudge to do something awesome with lights. We did this… We used all of the PWM channels at our disposal to handle the colors on our Encabulating Interface, and tossed in some analog stuff for good measure. Our software utilized the Encabulator’s accelerometer values as the interface’s interfacing variables, which is nice. Most of the board’s function was exercised, as was my brain, Emma’s brain, and Emma in general. She liked the feedback in a belly laugh way…so that is that. Pretty sure she and I both came out ahead on this effort. Here’s to 2014…look out for team swan tron.
…which I thought would be a slam dunk. As it turns out, the programming phase for team swantron is a laborious thing at best. Code is boring. I knew that coming in, but Emma picked up on my ruse…we do a lot of jumper-ing breadboards in programming phase. Saturday should be interesting.
We’re turbull encabulating… I’m lacking a sufficient power source to push a ton of these LEDs simultaneously, so that is that for now. Power brick and a back-up strip are in the mail, so ambition will dictate how bright we go with this. The physical stuff is largely roughed-out, so now the challenge lies in refining the UI to this thing. Well, the secondary user’s interface is the thing that needs attention. My user is ready to roll. Time is running short…tune in soon. *** **PROTIP**