In lieu of an actual post, I’ll leave you with this link to the photo album. The pictures tell the story and at 1,000 words per image you can just imagine this is a 45,000 word epic post.

On a side note: I changed the underlying software of the site to not save my tweets as new posts. They’ve now moved to the sidebar to help reduce the clutter that is this page :)

You wanted to know where the heat sinks went? THIS is where the heat sinks went!

These heat sink pictures are some of my favorites. SO nice and orderly. Just LOOK at that brushed aluminum!

Heat sink city!

Badier is laying tile??? In a box? With a cardboard floor???? WHAT IS GOING ON???

Badier is thinking about the most amazing tile in the world...

Well folks… your wait is over… here is what we put our blood, sweat, and tears (in decending order of volume) into all this time….

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Our baby. Standing proud in the shop sans gearboxes and stage.

“What the hell?”

I can hear you say it now… Well let me explain: This device is a convention-ready representation of the product that Badier’s company is going to bring to market.

“… What the hell?”

Yeah, continuing on. It’s a solar collector. You see there are these new solar elements (think tiny solar panels) that are REALLY good at collecting energy but they’re also REALLY EXPENSIVE. One of the cool things about these elements is that they will turn an (almost) set percentage of any light energy that falls on them into electrical energy. So if you put it out in the sun you’ll get some juice; put it out in sun that’s twice as intense, you’ll get almost twice the juice.

Those clear “tiles” are actually Fresnel lenses that take all the solar energy that falls on them and condenses it down onto a TINY piece of the really-expensive-yet-awesome solar panel. This way you get to harness all the light energy that falls on that huge thing we’ve made and channel it into a few square inches of your awesome solar element. If it goes off as planned this device can be mass manufactured to be 20% cheaper (watt-for-watt) than traditional solar panels. Talk about cool!

So now you know. Following are a few more shots of us screwing around with our new creation and transporting it to San Diego for the Solar Power International 08 show.

We are ze proud papa!

If you stand back it magnifies the active element. Note: there are 30 in there. 6 of them make up the image you see in this shot...

Oh we're feeling goooooooood.

Damn Badier, lookin manly! I look like a squirrel with an overinflated ego... You have to understand that we haven't slept for over 24 hours at this point and are higher than kites on the adrenaline rush that comes with finishing off a large project.

We both hurt our backs putting this thing up. We are old men...

And now… the end of our long journey… we have to take the damn thing apart and bring it to San Diego…

Boxin' her up.... You wondered what that box in my living room was for (you and ALL my neighbors) well this is it! (Notice my sexy break-away walls that are ROCK solid after being assembled... mmmmm design)

The entire project ready to ship!

Driving 2 hours on 0 hours of sleep? San Diego here we come!!

As we pulled up we were surrounded by no fewer than six men on forklifts. They are the Forkmasters. You don't mess with them... It was like watching bees. Really big bees dancing with forklifts...

Our packages make it to the convention hall. Thank you Forkmasters!

Unpacking in the convention hall.

Our baby makes her debut at the solar show!

... shop is cleaned and we

Done! And still friends too! Notice it is dark out. This is the same day I previously mentioned that we hadn't slept before... We did catch an hour or two in the van. Only half an hour with the driver asleep...

Oh not only are we done we did such a good job we made it into CNET’s slide show! (The have 17 images from the entire SD Convention Center and our model was one of them! Hell yeah!)

And so it ends. It was a hell of a ride and some of the more extreme engineering I’ve done in a LONG time.

And after it’s all said and done I have but one thing to say:

Anyone else’s company need frackin’ amazing work done on insane time scheduals and is willing to pay through the nose for it? I know some guys who are really good…

<end autofellation>

PS. Unlike Fry in Futurama I finished my caffeine regimin (40 cups of coffee 24 diet cokes) and failed to run around the room in a blur fixing the ills of the world… I feel somehow cheated… Maybe next time if I hit 50 cups….

Like a damn surgeon I tell ya!

Kids: this is NOT the way to use safety glasses…

Rivet rivet rivet! Like a frog of awesome!

Stage? I’m a carpet man!

Innards!

o shiny!

Polishin’ Eyes!

WHAT ARE SUCH THINGS FOR??

Parts start arriving!

What are we making? Tune in next post!

The following will do absolutely no justice to the topic. At all. Should it sound enjoyable and should you find yourself lacking a sense of self preservation/modesty/etc. I invite you to join us in 48 weeks when we really go to burning man.

As you may have figured from my previous post or the following comments, Donut and I went to Burning Man this year as part of a two-man scouting team. What we found will surely fill volumes and can’t be described in a blog post. If you’d like to hear stories put a few drinks in either of us (or both for the duo show. Our specialty!) and we’ll talk your ear off with madcap adventures.

For those of you haven’t seen us since (and thus still have your ears) burning man is best described as a post-apocalyptic-bacchanalian-art-festival-and-mass-survivalist-crash-course. You go to the desert and you survive in all the best ways possible. The playa (the “city” is built in a dried up lake bed) has the final word on all actions and you just ride out life for a week with 45,000 of your newest friends. Yeah, 45,000+ people make the trek to Reno Nevada and then head 75 miles north up a one lane service road to go survive the crap out of a week. Google may help me with the issue of describing scale: Yeah, it’s on google maps.

Other factoids:

• No money. You barter/trade/gift for everything that isn’t ice or coffee (sold at center camp)
• No water/food/anything. You want it, you pack it in.
• No trash. If you brought it in and it didn’t pass through your body (or at least make a decent stop in your stomach for a while) you’re packing it back out.
• Fire… it’s a big deal.
• Art…. that sound you just heard was the echo from my mind blowing.
• Oh just google it if you’re interested; It’s time for a few pictures.

These pictures and many more are available on Flickr but here’s a few I liked enough to post again:

This… this is a happy night…

The only thing I bought the entire week:

Sometimes you’ve just gotta ride with Jabba…

Fire Duck! The duck that runs of FIRE.

This is the Fire Organ. Yes it plays music. You can see Prudence (the woman who shot Mal in Firefly) playing it in the background. She, and this Fire Organ are balls-out crazy.

How do you survive a sand storm? YOU BECOME THE SANDPEOPLE!! HUUUUA HAAA HUUUUUUAALRG!
(This is Donut and I showing off our survival gear… and being Sandpeople.)

Speaking of dust and sand: Your hair may take on an… elderly look while on the Playa.

Our intrepid crew. I would survive myself to death anywhere with these fine people.

The Man. He Burns. That’s over 200 feet of fire. When the final explosion went off it set up a 600′ tall mushroom cloud of awesome. It was physically warm where we were standing… over a quarter of a mile away.

Oh and if minds were not bent enough: check out this AMAZING spider walker that I snagged a video of. This thing has to be 12 feet tall and weigh a few tonns. It’s powered but a huge V8 and would take an AT-AT downTOWN any day of the week.

And so the sun sets on our adventure… (oh yeah, I went there.)

To set the scale: Those wings are made out of HUGE sheets of metal and the figure in the middle is a normal-sized human goddess dancer.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this rant: Nothing I can say in a blog post could come NEAR to describing what the Burning Man experience is other than yelling “EPIC” at the top of my lungs. (It is NOT a soCal hippy music fest. The next person who asks me “who’s playing” shall feel the full wrath of a blogger angered)

Should you care to push past my “EPIC!” outbursts, I’d be more than happy to share stories along with the never-ending pictures/video.

So all in all this year’s scouting mission went better than ever could have been expected. Next year: we’re doing this thing in full glory.

48 weeks till the Man burns!

]]> http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/09/26/48-weeks-till-burning-man/feed/ 5 http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/07/27/weekend-arduino-projects-4-ways-to-hello-world/ http://betaorbust.com/blog/2008/07/27/weekend-arduino-projects-4-ways-to-hello-world/#comments Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:34:08 +0000 jfavreau http://betaorbust.com/blog/?p=30 Sooo it’s been a looooong time since I last posted and there have been reasons but honestly, let’s not get into them and just move on to what this post (actually written a couple months ago) is really about.

Warning: this post deals primarily with subjects that by all rights can be called ‘Nerdy as hell.’ Should such material be known to you as dull, boring, somnolent etc. stop now; It’s not worth it.

Onwards!

So recently I’ve been toying around with the idea of physical computing and trying to figure out something to do as a sort of introduction to the whole field before I begin my fully-functional-hexapod-computer-case-mod project (more details see here) There are quite literally hundreds of ways to start out but quite a few of them involve large-ish sums of money up front which doesn’t sound like my kind of dabbling… then: Lo! The Arduino came unto me and bestowed tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!

The Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Best of all you can have one and start playing with it for as little as $11.50 (although I opted for the pre-built version with a bit more functionality for $33.00 from my new friends at Sparkfun.) For a dabbler like me it’s perfect :)

Arduino Diecimila in hand I needed a project. Although I had originally aspired to replace the brain in my lovely roomba with the arduino it turns out my roomba was made 6 days BEFORE the i-robot folks implemented their current control scheme. Well boooo (all is not lost though, I have a hardware upgrade for it in the mail which will unlock all of the ROI goodness)

Having previously been a software guy my first idea was to make it say “hello world!”

For those of you who are not “software guys” the FIRST thing that every programmer does in ANY language when they start is make it print out “hello world!” If you want to have good crops and win your wars you offer up a slaughtered goat or virgin. If you want to learn a programming language you make it say “hello world!” This is the way things have been, are, and will always be, as they have been handed down from the ancients and we are not worthy enough to contest these points. Deal.

But here’s the first problem: physical computing doesn’t have a screen… there are no pop-up windows… no command line… just a bunch of pins that can can read inputs or give outputs… so a blinking or PWM fading LED it is .

So that’s done.

Well that’s damn boring… and I still have a MIGHTY need for “hello world” if only somebody had made up a form of communication that relied on a blinking thing… and MonkeyMorse was born. Quite a simple and not terribly well written program it takes in a string and translates it to morse code and blinks it out. NOW we’re getting somewhere :) (Code Here) First string up: hello world!

So after an implementation of serial communications hello world (Walkthough here) I figured it was time to do something from scratch… the only problem is that I still only had LEDs lying around… and other than making a Knight Rider mod for my car there didn’t seem to be a lot to do with them… until I found PoV.

The basic idea for this project is that if you take an array of LEDs (I have 10 of them) and make them blink while waving them back and forth it will produce an image in the viewer’s eye for a split second. Should that image be the long desired “hello world” so much the better.

As the Arduino has limited processing ability and I wanted the program to switch on and off the LEDs as fast as possible I opted to encode the message BEFORE uploading it to the chip. A decent bit of Matlabbing later and voila! a program to do just that (windows32 standalone program download here) You simply give it a bit of text, point it at a character set (just a bunch of BMPs) and hit go and it does all the work. Additionally: if needed it can be pointed at a bitmap file and instead of doing text it’ll convert the image into code for the MPoV system. Here it is in action:

Moving on: the chip code simply runs though the sequence of bits sent by the converter program and displays them on the LEDs much the same way the signal gets to your TV screen (except that it is essentially sideways and the motion of the board is the major scan direction) The hardware code is also available: MPoV Hardware Code

And the big finish!

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Awwwwww…. not as big as I had hoped….

Of note when working with chips and such with on-board hardware: You have VERY limited resources. I’m talking VERY limited. So limited in fact that my lovely 1100 1s and 0s do not actually fit into the memory space. So it can’t be loaded into memory all at one time. A handful of options exist:

1. lower the resolution – Fewer bits = smaller message.
2. Stream the data and get into memory management – Smaller chunks at a time streamed into the processor over a serial connection.
3. Load smaller pieces of the data and possibly make them off of other memory locations – There is a bit of system memory “off to the side” that I might be able to use but this is a little more extreme than I had planned.
4. Just deal with “HiWld!” – Can do RIGHT now.

As you may well have guessed, I went with option 4.

Unfortunately in my glee over a (mostly) working hello world program I failed to actually capture an image of the working final project (and as “Hello World” is supposed to be a quick exercise I’m not going to re-wire it) However I do have this one from a test I ran:

So there you have it. Four ways to hello world and a good deal of fun for an inexpensive-get-your-toes-wet-weekend project. Stay tuned for more madness!

To put it in colloquial terms: Clinic has pwned me hardcorz.

I’ve put over a hundred hours in in the last 6 days. Let’s do the math shall we?

6 days * 24 hours/day = 144 hours
144 hours – 100 hours on clinic = 44 hours of “Free Time ®”
44 hours of “Free Time ®” / 6 days = 7.3 hours of “Free Time ®” per day.

That’s five and a half hours average to do everything from shower to eat to sleep to keep up with the rest of my work from Mudd.
Here’s the kicker: a couple days ago I crashed out and slept for 14 hours. Workin’ them numbers again that leaves me with an average of 6 hours a day to get everything done.

Bottom line: I slept on a lab bench because it was not as comfortable as my bed and I knew I’d get up to work in the morning.

I have been pwned and pwned hard.

</RANT>

So in that aforementioned “Free Time ®” (I’m not sure who registered this as a trademark. All I know is that every time I use some of it I have to pay out the nose later on…) I did manage to watch two very well done videos which I will now share with ya’ll in an attempt to make this post less of a “Jacques whines about his life” and more something you’ll be glad you read…

These are visually clean but they drop the F-bomb a couple of times so unless you have headphones I wouldn’t suggest blasting this on your office computer…
That said, just click the image to play the video.

First off… a very well done “Drunk college Jedi” movie…

Second up: A great stage production number about those yellow stickers on SUVs. The beginning is kinda slow, but it’s a great video…

This last few days my life has been COMPLETELY taken over by clinic (thank goodness VLSI got through the work-heavy part JUST in time) At some point I’ll throw some pictures up here of the whole machine, but for tonight I have a quick story before bed. A lesson perhaps…

When testing things at high speed… Stand back.

That’s it. That’s my pearl of wisdom. “Sure sure” I hear you say. “Anybody knows that” Well, I’m here to tell you I know it better than most.

Tonight I was testing out my shrimpy-spin-dryer and its new motor.(Think:giant salad spinner for shrimp. But sideways. And continuous. And powered. And with a taste for human blood.) Very exciting stuff. (You’re going to have to trust me on that.) Anyways, the thing spins up nicely the first time (mind you, I haven’t actually mounted the motor, I’m holding it in tension on the belt drive so I can see how the system works before going on) So I thinks to myself, thinks I: “Let’s open this thing up and really see what she can do…”

Upon reflection, when holding a 28lb motor in your hands with your head next to a giant role of mesh rotating at high velocity, this is not a wise thing to think.

Sooooo I change out some drive pulleys, forget to do some multiplication, and damn near decapitate myself. In the space of… oh I don’t know, maybe half a second my beautiful contraption goes from looking something like this:

(note: this isn’t actually my spinner, I took these pics AFTER the fact so this one is the wet separator version that was still intact)

To this :(

(note: the twisted mess of mesh on the top there was wrapped neatly around and pinned down. Also all of the hoops, such as the one in the foreground, used to be concentric around the drive shaft.)

All while I’m a good safe twelve inches away with both hands occupied holding this motor.

It was at this point that I decided mechanical engineering needs to be done between the hours of 7:30 am and 4:am. After 4am it is no longer a good idea. So knowing that, I’m off to bed. It has been… educational.