August 2010
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Idle stepper motors
Today I tried to PWM the stepper motors when they are idle. There are several problems with this. First and formost is that any pwm-ing on the steppers results in a high pitched sound that I can’t stand. It’s probably caused by some vibration, so the benefits of lowering the power (reducing heat) is probably offset by the vibration and any wear and tear it may cause.
The second thing...
January 2010
3 posts
Letter chains
I wrote a java program that will find overlaps between words and arrange them into chains; for example:
BICEONET.
BIC
ICE
CEO
EON
ONE
NET
ET.
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finished
Finished sign earlier this week. The calibration software I made took a long time, but now it’s pretty robust and the end result is a sign that is much more accurate. I should document how to use it. Rick also came by and filmed the sign. Which means I’m done. For now.
December 2009
5 posts
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November 2009
4 posts
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October 2009
12 posts
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Words
Spent the morning working with word lists. I liked what I saw when I looked over old lists. I did some work with SEX, LOVE, OLD, and FUN. Here are some words from FUN’s neighborhood, arranged alphabetically:
AHOY. AIDS. BEER. BEST. BIKE. BLOW. BLUE. BLUR. BOAT. BODY. BORE. BOSS. BOYS. BRAT. BULL. BURN. BUSY. CAKE. COOL. COPY. DAMN. DARE. DART. DATE. GIFT. GIRL. GOOD. GOOF. GULL. GUYS. HULA....
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Met with maya at her gallery on Saturday, then wired some IR sensors for her. Spent Sunday installing the sensors, configuring the max patch, etc
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Some stuff done
Yesterday was productive, thus today was not really. I did two tests. One tested all letter combinations on the device. I found one problem: Y->X. This turned out to be mechanical, as the shaft caught on some of the chipped plexiglass. A little work with a file fixed this right up.
I wrote a script that will take lists of words and isolate only the 4-letter ones, and arrange them...
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Lotsa stuff got done today
Things I did today:
Ordered servos and shaft couplers from servocity ($400!)
Ordered arduinos from sparkfun.
Worked out algorithm for sequences with arduino, implemented it in processing. (This was a biggy that I should have done sooner. I couldn’t do any other tests before I got this one out of the way. It was hard enough that I had a hard time getting around to it but not hard enough...
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Updated association apps
After I got the shelves up, I modified the logging so it will work with a db instead of going to flat files. Made some other fixes. It took a while.
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September 2009
9 posts
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light sign drudgery
Put lights and bars back into the prototype. Everything was so messy that it was annoying me, so I abandoned getting the prototype working for today. I sourced parts for the boards. I’m now designing the light board and I’ve just started the project. Tomorrow I should finish the design and see if there are any parts I’m missing.
The shield, off the top of my head, needs:
...
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vacation. prototype.
I’m behind on posts because I went on vacation last week. Before I left Tom and I raced to get the prototype running. It runs, but it’s jenky. The code is all in place, but the lights collide and come loose. Today, trying to get back into working, I built one of the bars out of metal and it seems very promising.
I need to implement some wire management. Perhaps if I replace the wire...
August 2009
9 posts
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WatchGot all the motors sequenced independantly. I tweaked the stepper library so that it won’t block the main Arduino loop, and wrote a wrapper for the servo lib so I can control the speed. Tom came in and implemented the sequencing. Now I can say at what time I want what motor to do what!
Walking home, I thought it wouldn’t be too much of a streach to implement pwm on the remaining pins....
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Behind on logging
Did a buch of stuff the past few days. This weekend I restrung my guitar for the first time in a while and sketched iphone ideas. I also got my sketchup design finalized and managed, with difficulty, to export to 2d.
Yesterday I did some cocos2d (iphone game api) tutorials and I came up with an idea that I actually want to make. I was in the studio for about 10 hours. The first 7 hours were very...
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light sign
Pretty good day in the studio—though things were slow going. (long night last night) Tom helped look at the software side of things. I thought we could outsource the pwm to the tlc5940 but the clock signal it requires is too much a burden on arduino. I think the way to do pwm, if I want it, is to program it on another arduino.
I found a few more problems in the light layout. I have most of the...
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bunch of stuff
called parents. worked out some montreal travel plans. Pretty much finalized the dimensions of the movable light sign. Will go over it once more before I translate what I have into sketchup.
Read about iPhone games and toolkits.
Posted my font averaging link on two design sites.
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Font averaging blog post
Yesterday I spent a long time tweaking the font averaging software. I wrote an app that would compare the current font to a bitmap of Times. If it found a match it would let me know. This morning I published the end result:
http://bit.ly/kerPW
July 2009
22 posts
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didn't go to studio
Bunch of emails I think. Worked on blog post about centrality in the word association database. Touched up Death Death Death.
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Motor mounts
Drilled and tapped, like, 5 motor mounts. Took me all afternoon. broke one drill bit. Cut metal so I can make 10 more.
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WatchGot new motor working and lowered guide rod. Works, but holding torque is too weak. Will just have to leave the motors on while not moving. Tapped another mounting bar for the other motor.