The possibility for robotics at home just got a lot more interesting. I have been following the development of the Pi Raspberry board, which promises the ability to have a basic computer for something like $25. (I imagine building a custom home file server with something like that, or even re-wiring an old laptop!) It turns out that a Broadcom employee, Gert von Loo, has been experimenting with an add-on board that has the ability to communicate with other kinds of devices. The video above shows a C program, but he notes that one could just as easily use Python or even a shell script. The motor in the video is capable of lifting 60kg.
All posts tagged hardware
I need to upgrade the hard drive in the Mac Mini. It looks more difficult than I would like. Maybe an external drive?
Screen shot 2011-08-23 at 9.54.37 AM.png
Another number, a ratio kept popping into my mind as I wrote the previous post that featured the golden ratio of 1.618. The number was 1.4. It turns out that there is another “golden” ration based on 1.414, which is the square root of 2, which also happens to be the length of the diagonal of a square with sides of length 1.
Wikipedia lists a few more aspect ratios of note:
Other Aspect Ratios
From left to right:
1.3 = 4:3: Some (not all) 20th century computer monitors (VGA, XGA, etc.), standard-definition television
1.414 = √2:1: International paper sizes (ISO 216)
1.5 = 3:2: 35 mm film
1.6 = 16:10, widely used widescreen computer displays (WXGA)
1.618 = Golden ratio, close to 16:10
1.6 = 5:3: super 16 mm, a standard film gauge in many European countries
1.7 = 16:9: widescreen TV
Chains of events are interesting. The historian of ideas James Lee Burke once called his own particular take on such chains of events the “ping pong theory of history.” If you have planned any project of some complexity than you are somewhat familiar with such chains: you begin, for example, with wanting to replace the tile countertops in your kitchen with something with fewer cracks in it, some lovely solid, smooth surface like granite or quartz or formica. You can do that, but then you realize that that will change the overall look of the kitchen and perhaps now would be a good time to change out the cabinet doors. But wait, can you simply change the cabinet doors or do you need to reface the cabinets completely or do you need to replace the cabinets? And if you are going to do that, then it might be time to replace the dishwasher. Of course you have to balance this with what you can afford, but you also want to do things in a logical order and do it right. And so you begin with an overall outcome but then you have to backtrack to the correct beginning of things, with the first nail to be pulled that will begin a complex series of events that will eventually give you the kitchen of your dreams.
Of you can have happen to you what happened to us yesterday.
On Friday afternoon the new monitor for the kitchen computer arrived, a lovely 24-inch Viewsonic. The thing is far wider than we imagined: it’s like having the windshield of a car in front of you, but the clarity of the screen is so much better than the old 19-inch Dell VGA monitor we had. The width of the thing meant it spreads across the small kitchen desk quite a bit more than the old monitor, which left little to no room for the old Cambridge SoundWorks speakers we had. They weren’t great speakers, but they served well.
But they no longer fit. I dug out a pair of Apple Pro speakers which I’ve had lying around for several years now, ever since retiring my Power Mac Dual G4 at work. They look great and fit perfectly under the monitor, as you can see in the image below, but they require hacking to work with a regular stereo minijack port, because the Apple Pro speakers came with one of Apple’s limited life special dongle/ports — I forget its pretentious name. I have a dead Power Mac somewhere that I saved for express purpose of taking the digital audio connector out of it so I don’t have to cut into the wires of the speakers.
But as long as I am interested in hacking speakers, why not hack those Cambridge speakers? I’ll need an amp for the Apple Pro speakers, I believe, having researched their hacking a bit. And so I destroyed the cases of the Cambridge speakers, took out the amp and the speakers and then quickly re-soldered things to see if they worked. (They did!)
To see if they worked, and here at least we turn to the ostensible topic of this post, I needed a mini-jack output device into which I could plug the speakers. But I wasn’t so sure of my wiring, especially my soldering, and of the consequences of a short-circuit, that I felt comfortable plugging the speakers into the kitchen computer or my phone or my laptop or any other hand device.
Ah! I thought. I have an old iPod Video somewhere. I haven’t used it in years and I would be willing to sacrifice it for the sake of this experiment. I dug through the usual collections, and then I turned to the less usual collections. No iPod Video. (I still don’t know where it is.) But I did come across a 4G iPod and a portable CD player. It turns out that the iPod has a bad hard drive — I remembered it dying after I plugged it in and saw the unhappy face on the screen — and the CD player proved my wiring, and soldering, was good to go.
Fortunately the CD player worked and after some confusion, due to having the wrong power cord plugged in, the newly hacked speakers were producing sound. Here they are in their new enclosure:
TechCrunchTV has a series called “Founder Stories.” The one with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot Industries, is quite good. There is some discussion of the difference between being a software startup and a hardware startup.
The old saying goes, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As someone interested in making, in the full Make Magazine sense of that word, I was delighted to read about a project to “open source” a wireless network … in Afghanistan. The project is called FabFi and it uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. The project’s home page has an Afghanistan TLD — and how many times do you get to click on a link with an af in it? — and notes: “With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity—thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources.”
I’m lucky enough to live in a community where our public utility, owned and operated by the city, offers amazing fiber-to-the-home connectivity, and so my desire in building anything like this is tempered, but, as they also say, you never know when you may need to know how to build your own network infrastructure…
The Raspberry Foundation is a British organization that has put together specs for a computer the size, quite literally of a flash drive:
Raspberry Pi Computer
On the left is the HDMI port. On the right is the USB port. The black box in the middle is a 12MP camera module. The rest of the hardware specs are:
- 700MHz ARM11
- 128MB of SDRAM
- OpenGL ES 2.0
- 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- Composite and HDMI video output
- USB 2.0
- SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
- General-purpose I/O
- Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
I hope to keep an eye on this and to grab one when I can. I also read somewhere recently that Google is folding the Arduino platform into Android. Is this right? (If you know more, please fill me in.)
It turns out that one of the problems a lot of people have with their homes — the inability to get your wireless network to reach some part of your house or yard — is a function of the kinds of materials we use to make our homes energy efficient: a lot of the wraps and foam sheets used in new construction have some sort of foil layer to reflect radiant heat in and/or out of the house. (I am also reminded of my friends Alan and Deb who have a lovely stone house built with two-foot thick walls that is backed into the side of a hill. (That’s a wireless problem I would love to have — oh, Indiana, how I miss you now.)
So Cisco bought a perfectly good little company with a perfectly good product and then lost it all by not figuring out how to distinguish their product from the wide variety of multi-use devices that were packing “good enough” functionality into their units. The Flip is dead, and I’m okay with that. No, I don’t think the video recording functionality, including ergonomics, of my iPhone is quite as good as the Flip, but that also goes for my point and shoot Canon camera, which has largely sat in its case of late. I think the really great thing about the Flip was how some of my colleagues were using it in their classes: it was a great “good enough” video camera that made it easy to work with video. That part I will miss — I don’t see my university buying a bunch of iPod Touches any time soon. And negotiating with multiple device interfaces and usages does slow things down in the classroom.
Ack. Restarting the home NAS was more difficult than I imagined, thanks in part to Amazon sending me mis-matched drives. While trying to trouble-shoot what turned out to be a hardware problem, I came across Netgear’s great online forum for its ReadyNAS products and a nicely-maintained FAQ.
You have to admire the ingenuity of the folks at Asus: they have developed a shipping container that doubles as a computer case for a range of the their motherboards:
For the record, I wrote 9000 words in less than a week while at the EVIADA Summer Institute, and I did it all on my MacBook, augmented. Augmented how? With one of these:
And one of these:
But, for the record, I’d settle for any decent 22″ or 24″ HD display.
