So... I am just taking a few moments to post that I HATE WORKING LATE.

In related news, I am working on a new charge pump design, which is improving testing my analog design skills yet again. This one has a less stinky and explosive more, um, graceful failure mode than the last one.

I can remember a time not long hence where the most important thing I was worried about was whether my design would work in the first place. Now the thing I worry about most is whether I will get sued when some redneck idiot hooks the power up backwards while installing the device nude, and lights his dangly parts on fire.

In other related news, I am getting really tired of freebies. So many coding projects that are effectively giving my life away one small morsel at a time.

Finally, I think I have a vitamin deficiency or something. Can you believe how negative I am being? Sheesh!

One of my responsibilities for Defcon this year is going to be a channel information "ticker" for the TV feeds at the hotel. Channel 2 will be replaced with this neat little app, which should be completed fairly soon. I am posting this test release just so that everybody can get a quick feel for it.

More news follows...

I just picked up a new laptop: the Asus Z71V. Overall, this is the most Linux compatible laptop I have ever owned. It replaced the fully awful Acer Ferrari, which was so full of massive Bios problems, and got so hot, that I just gave up on it. I suspect that the XP drivers cheat by scaling back the speed even when you need it, but hey, maybe I just got a lemon.

Anyhow, there is very little advice that I have for Z71V owners, since everything just kind of worked. I suggest adding pci=assign-busses to your grub.conf kernel line, and that is about it. I am cheerfully using my Intel ProWireless 2915 card as well as a Prism54 on Gentoo, and loving it.

p.s. To Intel: I am a security consultant, when I am not hacking on embedded systems, and I would really love to have monitor mode on the IPW.

This is a tad late, but I thought I would post it anyhow. I went to the VRC Games again this year. The competition was neat, with lots of kids again, and way more Lego sumo robots than last year.This is a good thing. OTOH, there were probably fewer line followers and standard/mini sumo entries, and that is too bad. My Belligerator was not yet ready (although I made a lot of progress last month during the build day). I did take a lot of pix and video, and will post them shortly.

Wee-haw. I am back from the dead.
Actually, it is just that I have been insanely busy, but progress has been made.

1. I downloaded a program called mach2 for running my (Andre's actually) CNC. It is funny to see the difference that a properly written control method can make. The previous software (TurboCNC) was good enough for some applications, but was a little on the flaky side. I get twice the rapid rate on the new package, and I have no issues with lost steps or poorly interpolated small diameter circles anymore. I can highly recommend Mach2 for any sherline mill system (It is a bargain for $200).
2. I have created the head and some of the miscellaneous other parts for the belligerator. I think I have about 4 hours of work until I can try balancing this bad boy. Yay.
3. I have been working on some code for a company (more vague maybe?), and I just threw together an HTML scrape -> RSS -> Proxy server package. If all goes well, I may be able to open source it. I used mxTidy, XPath2RSS, and some secret sauce

The 2005 VRG games have been announced, and the room is finalized. Attached are the posters for the event!

Poster 1: Portrait format, 2.2MB
Poster 2: Landscape format, 3.0MB

The event will be on June 11, 2005, in Townsquare D at BCIT.

I feel a little guilty, but I have been really busy. I apologize for the lack of updates.

I was considering turning this blog into more of a business proposition, but I realized that personal robotics (or hobby robotics for that matter) are unlikely to become the cash cow I would like. Because of this, I am going to keep this blog as a personal blog, kind of a replacement for http://enki.cthuugle.com/.

Following are some news about my life, and some updates on the robotics projects...

I am back! And not a moment too soon. After accumulating 58 hours of overtime in the last couple of weeks, I finally had time to work on the "ultimate servo hack"®, and the results are good. Not only have I crammed the step and direction mode into the design, but I also have gotten velocity and ramping working. All of this is still in only 2k of ROM.

Now I am coding a quick Python app to run on your OS of choice, which will allow for quick and easy control of these servos. You'll be able to run the servos from windows/linux/OSX, and hopefully I will get it interfaced to Pyro as well.

(picked up from robots.net) O'reilly developer weblogs has this neat article about learning machines. It serves as a pretty decent "state of the union" about robotics and machine learning. Some interesting social extrapolation as well.

I am sorry that it has been so long since I last updated. We had a major system failure over the last week, and I have been fighting to bring the server up quickly and completely (and I would like to note, with no data loss at all). I am taking advantage of this catastrophe in order to move to chroot jailed system services throughout the entire system, and much better isolation between services. I am in effect trying to implement trusted solaris in Linux form.

Soon, I will be posting the continuation of my ultimate servo hack (which does actually work), in instalments:

Bit banged serial in 512 bytes ROM on an atTiny26L
Quadrature state machines, and interrupt on change
PID loops, and motion profiles
Tying it together: interfacing and open collector serial lines