Life Slowly Returns to Normal

Posted on 17 September, 2001 by steevithak

Saturday the DPRG held Roborama 01.b as planned. There were a few interesting new robots competing as well as a couple of records broken but, overall, I think attendance was down a bit due to the terrorist attacks. The events for walking robots were delayed a few weeks and may evolve into a seperate contest.

On Sunday evening, Susan and I attended the opening performance of the season at the Dallas Symphony. The original program called for Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. In recognition of recent events, however, the Ravel work was replaced by Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

We also spent some time this weekend trying to buy a flag. They’re virtually unobtainable though. Apparently over 500,000 have been sold this week and even places like Walmart have long since sold out of them. Fabric stores seem to be selling out of red, white, and blue ribbon as well.

Last night robots.net got slashdotted for the first time. Mod_virgule held up just fine – in fact, I was pleasantly suprised at how well it performed considering the amount of file I/O being done.

And today it’s back to work churning out more Perl code.

More on Walking Robots

Posted on 9 September, 2001 by steevithak

I went to a regular DPRG meeting for the first time in several months yesterday. It turned out to be fairly productive. Eric and I did a little empirical research with his walking robot (which we’re likely to use as a starting point for the CF Walker design). We verified that it can travel up a handicap ramp. It would need some software changes and possibly some modifications to the feet to maintain balance on steeper inclines (or a sensor on each foot that could measure the inclination of the ground with each step and adjust the tilt of the leg accordingly).

We timed it moving 8 feet (2.4 meters) – it took about 20 seconds. That translates to 8.3 seconds to complete a meter (compared to our goal of 1.4 seconds per meter). We guessed there was a lot of software and hardware optimization that
could be done with the existing robot and I wouldn’t be suprised if we could drop it to 4-5 seconds per meter pretty easily. To get better speed than that would probably take more significant redesigning of hardware. Hopefully I can crank out some drawings shortly so we can start cutting parts for a 1/3 scale model in the next week or two.

Otherwise, this weekend has been spent pondering more corporate and “intellectual property” issues. Disney and the recording industry are making a major push to take away more consumer rights with the SSSCA, a new bill they bought from Senators Frizt Hollins and Ted Stevens. The bill hasn’t been passed yet but they’ll be pushing hard to get it passed this year. It’s sort of a sequal to the DMCA which took away our fair use rights to “intellectual property”. As many of us did when DMCA came up, Susan and I will be writing letters and doing what we can to stop the SSSCA bill from passing. But, of course, it’s very hard for citizens to interfere with corporate control of the government these days.

Slashdot has an article about the EFF OAL, yet another free music license. While the OAL looks interesting, I’m afraid what’s needed to fix the problem is something more than just another license. I have some thoughts on a possible solution that have been swirling in my brain for a couple of years but I haven’t quite managed to work out exactly how to make it work yet.

Robots Fighting Fires

Posted on 18 March, 2001 by steevithak

The DPRG held the regional for the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest in Dallas today. I took a few photos and will try to post them tomorrow or Monday on robots.net along with a summary of the action.

Otherwise, I spent the day hacking on a Perl/DBI/PostgreSQL project. I’m looking forward to the release of PostgreSQL v7.1 (which will happen real soon now, hopefully). I keep hearing good things about how fast it is.

I also ran across the new 1040.com tax form for recently laid-off employees of dot-coms. I know a few people who’ll need it this year.

CPiA Drivers

Posted on 18 April, 2000 by steevithak

The DPRG RoboRama 00.a was held Saturday and, for a change, I made it out there to watch. It was the first time in a while I’ve made it to a contest. I took a few photos for those who missed it. If you’re in the Dallas area and would like to come to the next contest or a regular meeting, check the calendar for time and locations.

I got a chance to download and compile the Linux 2.3.99-Pre5 kernel yesterday. If you’ve followed my news page for long, you’ll remember I’ve been playing with the Linux USB support for my CPiA-based Zoomcam camera. It’s been several revs since I last had things running and it took a few compiles as well an email or two exchanged with the CPiA driver authors to get things working again. The USB CPiA driver has been merged with the existing Parallel Port CPiA driver. This means smaller, more efficient code than two completely seperate drivers but the downside is that the CPiA driver is no longer in the USB driver tree and you have to compile the CPiA components as modules and then use modprobe to install them after the system boots. Anyway, while vidcat produces better quality images, I’m trying out the webcam utility from XawTV. At the moment it’s just a boring shot of the conference room here at NCC updated a couple of times minute. If it doesn’t blow up after a day or two maybe I’ll point it something more interesting.

DPRG Regional Fire-Fighting Robot Contest

Posted on 13 March, 2000 by steevithak

Sunday we dragged the mower and weed-whacking equipment out of the garage and spent the day trying to make our front and back yard look acceptable again.

With all the stuff going on this weekend, I didn’t get to make it out to the DPRG-sponsored regional fire fighting contest at the Science Place. Fortunately, Robert Jordon took some photos of the event and posted the results on the DPRG mailing list. One of these days I need to get back to work on my ‘bot, who has been lying dormant under the workbench for over a year.

If I get time today, I’m going to take a look at the mod_virgule code and see if I can’t put together a patch to give it a little more flexibility in user name support.