Last Sunday I went on a mountain bike ride with Router Dave on a couple trails I'd never been on before. We Chicoans are so lucky to have such a nice park so close to us. After a ~4 mile trek straight down the canyon, I thought it would be a good idea to cool off by jumping into the creek at Bear Hole. It was nice, but when I was climbing a rock my foot slipped a few inches straight into a pile of broken glass where someone had smashed a bottle. Much blood and pain followed:
Sorry for the graphic image, but that's my foot after all! Please note that this happened about a mile above where the gate was locked and across the creek from the road, so there was a fair amount of gunk accumulated in the wound after a nice swim and bike ride down to Dave's waiting parents. (thanks again for the help!)
I am also in a fair amount of (non-physical) pain because my trusty MacBook Pro's keyboard and trackpad suddenly stopped working last week. Of course I feel naked without having a computer I can tote anywhere - sans external keyboard and mouse. After a couple phone calls to the Apple store, it was made clear that I'd have to send the computer in and sell my soul to pay for it. Did I mention I was just under 20 days out of warranty? *sigh*
I went to the bookstore on campus - our local Apple authorized reseller - and begged the manager to order me the part and let me install it myself. After 2 trips and much pleading on my part he finally gave in and ordered me a new topcase for wholesale price! What a nice guy :) Of course this means that I'm on my own for installation and I can throw any warranty out the window, but I love excitement. I'll keep you posted how the install goes next Thursday or Friday when the part comes in.
That's all for now. Until next time, keep on truckin'.Labels: autonomouscar, personal
BLOGGERID: 1098614558344287137 -------- TITLE: lazy with linux AUTHOR: david DATE: 7/21/2007 02:02:00 PM ----- BODY: I had big plans this weekend to go down to Fresno State for the Summer Arts program for a day or two, then come back up to have a tour of Pixar. All this was abandoned upon hearing from Johnny that the Pixar trip was canceled for one reason or another. The bear of it is that I had already taken Friday off of work. I was left with a free day to do whatever I wanted! So naturally I went to Linux. I have gotten the cross-compiling toolchain working on my Macbook Pro to get my own code on the gumstix board I've been working on - but there's a snag. The version I'm using is too new for the OS that came pre-installed on the Gumstix, so I had to upgrade it. After practicing flashing the file-system image on the gumstix with some pre-built images from Dave Hylands, I was finally confident enough to use my own home-compiled image, but the OSX version of Buildroot for the gumstix doesn't support the Verdex motherboard that I have. Long story short, I was in a major bind. Linux to save the day! I went to the Apple store (where I find myself at least once a week these days - even if I'm not buying anything) and picked up a LaCie pocket external hard drive. Using rEFIt which is an amazing EFI replacement for OSX, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (who comes up with these names?) to the hard drive, and left a partition of free space to allow a future installation of another OS should I need to later. I can triple boot with no need to partition my meager 100 gig MBP hard drive! Plus I found that I don't even have to kill my uptime! I now have the current version of Buildroot - which does support the verdex motherboard that I have - up and compiling on Ubuntu. I just finished flashing the file-system image and kernel with my own build... I don't think I've ever been so happy to see "Hello World!" in my life! And mad props to Michael for letting me take over his kitchen table this weekend ;)Labels: autonomouscar, geek
BLOGGERID: 4195599510209345746 -------- TITLE: GPS on the table AUTHOR: david DATE: 6/21/2007 11:51:00 AM ----- BODY: Another update for my linux powered autonomous car project :) After I successfully björked the USB and bluetooth connections for the gumstix motherboard with one config file write, I've had no way to connect to the gumstix motherboard. I bought a few of the 60 pin headers to try to make my own breakout board, but realized quickly that unless there is a custom-made PCB to go along with it, it was an effort in vain. Meanwhile, the GPSStix boards were back in stock at the 'ol gumstix warehouse, so I snatched one of those up as quickly as I could. I also bought a few more toys from Acroname (which I'll get into later) but most importantly a TTL level RS-232 to USB adapter, as well as an active GPS antenna from Spark Fun Electronics for just $14. Phew, what a mess of wires this is going to be! The USB adapter lets me connect the FFUART of the Verdex to my macbook pro. This is crucial because the motherboard uses this UART as the default linux console when all else fails (or is messed up due to my linux n00bness). Put it together with a wire-wrapping tool, and it will come out something like this:
Needless to say it took a while, but I got everything working before midnight last night, as well as a shell script to log the GPS coordinates of wherever you are. Plugging these into google maps (because I'm so sophisticated) the GPS unit was accurate to within several feet, inside. I'm going to do some more testing, but it looks like it's going to be about perfect!
There's nothing like loggin in via SSH over a bluetooth connection to a linux box the size of a stick of gum (that's powered with my cell phone charger :P).
*** Update ***
I whipped up a shellscript to take a GPS coordinate every 30 seconds and log it to a text file. I put it all in my backpack on the way home from work, and logged my journey home to Oakland from the Six Apart office in San Francisco. If you have Google Earth, you can follow my journey from a KML File I created.
Note the jaggedy (?) edges at some points; this is because I was only capturing every 30 seconds. Also, you can see when I went in the tunnel under the bay because I didn't get any readings until I popped up on the other side. I might do the same thing on the way to Chico on Amtrak tomorrow, and have been contemplating taking it up with me to Mt. Shasta when I climb it this weekend. :)
From what it looks like, it is getting between 1 and 3 meter accuracy, 5 at some points. Again, this is perfect! I can't wait to get going with the software for this thing.
Before I go, I'm going to leave you with a video of the commercial we helped shoot in roseville a couple weeks ago:
Labels: autonomouscar
BLOGGERID: 9063795236680447146 -------- TITLE: down by the bay AUTHOR: david DATE: 6/04/2007 10:35:00 PM ----- BODY: What a whirlwind week! After I turned 21 last Tuesday, I've been going non-stop as usual. Of course I got a call at 11am on Wednesday from my boss making sure I "really was going to make it into work". I did - just barely - but I did. That was my last day as an employee of the IMC at CSU, Chico; I'm not returning this fall for a number of reasons, the least of which just that I'm bored with it and need to move on with my life. I put in my 3 years as a state employee, now I can move on to other things - although I'll still drop by the basement and say hi every now and again :) I jumped in the car after packing my stuff up to make sure I got to my new job in San Francisco. I'm interning for the summer at Six Apart where I'm helping out with a few things, basically whatever they need me for. I'm actually at work right now scrambling to get the new beta release of Movable Type 4.0 ready to launch at midnight. It's quite exciting! I've been here 3 days now and have already learned so much it makes me shudder! Either that or it's the mad hangover that's been going on since Tuesday... Finally, I got my GPSStix in the mail after it's been on backorder more than a month. I hooked it up to the gumstix and everything works swimmingly - or at least until I messed up the bluetooth settings AND the USB settings in one fell swoop! I'm waiting until I have enough money to place an order to Acroname for a TTL to RS232 voltage converter and a few I2C serial converters and the such.Labels: autonomouscar, sixapart
BLOGGERID: 5472219437975872547 -------- TITLE: cablecam goes live and new internship AUTHOR: david DATE: 5/26/2007 08:18:00 PM ----- BODY: A few weeks ago, Johnny, Rick, B and I went to Roseville to set up our newly built cablecam over a waterslide at Golfland SunSplash for a commercial shoot they were doing. It was a 2-day event for us, the first day setting everything up and testing out the equipment, the second day doing the actual shoot. It was a lot of fun working in a "real" Hollywood environment. We worked together with the director, grips, lighting guys, and the whole bit; it reminded me of working with the community access TV guys in Redding a few years ago: always yelling at the camera people to tighten the shot or at the talent to scream louder :P We had two successful days of shooting with very few hiccups - in fact, nothing a little duct tape couldn't solve on the spot! As usual, there are plenty more pictures at the associated flickr photoset. I'm turning into a bit of a flickr whore, but that's okay :)
We have a bit of video footage I'll try to grab from Johnny before I skip town, plus we're supposed to get a copy of the final :30s spot eventually.
Also, I just signed on with Six Apart to work as an intern for the summer on their professional line of products, namely TypePad and Movable Type. I'm quite excited to live in San Francisco for a few months and code perl all day long :) I start next Thursday - after, of course, the fun-filled day of bar hopping and general mayhem that is my 21st birthday next Tuesday.Labels: autonomouscar, geek
BLOGGERID: 4649842519195218316 -------- TITLE: cablecam and gumstix AUTHOR: david DATE: 5/05/2007 03:16:00 PM ----- BODY: First off, we did a test run of the cable cam last night with a tape in the camera. Of course _someone_ left the night vision setting "on", so the video looks like crap. Take a peek: We used a jalopy of a camera - an old Digital8 Sony HandyCam - but it did the trick for our testing purposes. All in all, we're excited about the shoot on Tuesday! Also, I I got my gumstix in the mail on Friday and I've been dying to test them out since. I don't have a breakout board for the 60-pin connector yet, (parts pending from digikey) so it's just sitting there looking pretty for now. Brendan had the studio set up for another shoot, so after much begging, he snapped a couple pics of the board for me when he was done. (thanks again!) They turned out beautifully! Front:
Back:
With any luck, I should have the thing up and running by mid week!Labels: autonomouscar
BLOGGERID: 4889178432793629137 -------- TITLE: Rocket Car AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/23/2007 10:19:00 AM ----- BODY: In working on the autonomous car project, my friend "Router" Dave and I decided that the R/C Car was not going nearly fast enough (even with the upgraded motor and gearing). How on earth would we fix this? Luckily, I had a few "A" size Estes rocket engines in a box in my closet. After a bit of duct tape and some quick and dirty wiring, we had a genuine rocket car. It went pretty fast, but ... there was still something lacking. Router went to our local Hobbytown USA and picked up a pack of "D" rocket engines. Estes engine sizes are like the Richter scale, that is B's are twice as powerful as A's, C's twice that of B's, etc..., so we're looking at a significant performance increase. We took everything out to the airport to find a long, straight, wide and preferably empty road. Duct tape in hand, we fixed the first D engine to the bottom of the car with high hopes. Everything went off without a hitch, except it still didn't go nearly fast enough! That and we had 2 more engines and a still-intact RC car. With more duct tape, we put the 2 remaining engines on the bottom of the car.
Hilarity Ensued.
Take a look at the youtube video that highlights the first and second attempts:
See the smile?
Not a bad Sunday afternoon if I may say so!
As always, more pics at the Autonomous Car Photoset on flickr.Labels: autonomouscar
BLOGGERID: 4847706493470416714 -------- TITLE: the autonomous car project AUTHOR: david DATE: 4/16/2007 12:01:00 AM ----- BODY: Several years ago, when I was in high school, I was into hobby electronics. I loved building circuits, breaking stuff to see how it worked, and I even started to build my own robots. (don't mind the tripod site... it's pretty old!) I never graduated past the BASIC Stamp microcontroller when I abandoned the hobby in pursuit of other things - like a real car! Well, I got the itch again, but I decided to take things a step further. A couple weeks ago I bought a remote control car from R/C Country in Sacramento, and I plan on making it fully autonomous over the next several weeks/months. Since it's been a few years since I've set out on a project like this, I've got quite a few ideas backed up of where to take it already. I've already bought 3 sonar sensors for range finding, a serial servo controller to manage steering and throttle control with room to spare, and a few other bits of electronics for it. I plan on having a gumstix motherboard as the brain - which is quite a step up from the BS2! This thing is going to have bluetooth, wifi, GPS for navigation, and a 3-axis accelerometer; it's going to be a fully autonomous itinerant webserver of sorts :) It's all still in early stages of development, with lots of discussion and thought about various things, but I'm excited to be working with my hands and even more so to be back in the electronics game! Here's a few pictures of me, Router Dave, and Johnny working (and playing) on our various projects:
There are a few more on the Flickr Photoset.Labels: autonomouscar, geek
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