DrawBot – The Software, Part I (and an existential conversation)

This morning the USPS website told me that the remaining parts from Adafruit left Oakland yesterday.  As of this moment, they should be sitting at my local Post Office… but not go out for delivery until tomorrow as today is a postal holiday.¹  In any case, I just realized that a DrawBot based on Sandy Noble’s Polargraph will require some basic knowledge of Processing.  I guess I better get learning!

1. • My current self [CS] would like to point out to my past self [PS] that if you had only placed the order one day earlier, you’d probably have had all the parts this weekend to work on.  Heck you could even have been done by now.
   • PS would counter, first, that I couldn’t have ordered all of the parts necessary without having first sought some input from people who have done this before me.  And, second…
   • CS would interrupt saying, “Hey PS, what happened to you, man?  You used to be so cool!  What you were afraid of?  Burning a chip or some damn thing?  That’s how you learn!  Buy a helmet!  In any case, people have built these things out of complete junk before!  Where is your sense of adventure?!”
   • PS would remind CS it is not polite to interrupt, “And, secondly, as I was saying, there’s no point in not making use of the various resources available to one.  It would be brash and foolhardy to simply jump in not knowing what the heck you/we were doing.  And, thirdly, in the fullness of time, I think you’ll come to understand that a few day’s delay in assembling a robot is but a blink of the eye in comparison to the time you’ll spend assembling, tuning, and operating said robot.”
   • CS, “Really?  ‘Fullness of time’?  Seriously, man, who talks like that?  I suppose the delay is not such a big deal, but the momentum one has when tackling a project is not an inconsequential concern.  I don’t know about you, but I have the attention span of a gnat.  <Oh!  Shiny!>  It is entirely possible that by the time the final parts arrive, in less than 24 hours, I may have moved on to some new project.”
   • PS, “Momentum, schmomentum.  You might move on to a new project?  Do you realize that you’ve got 16 posts on your site yammering on about this project – when all you have so far is one half-assembled circuit board?  No, you’re going to have to do better than that.  Besides, if you had simply moved to Brooklyn already like I told you, none of this would have been an issue.  You could have just walked over to Adafruit and picked up all the parts you required.”
   • CS, “Move to Brooklyn?  That’s your answer?  I live in the Bay Area, as in ‘California.’  Chances are work is going to have me driving down to Silicon Valley at some point this week anyhow.  And you want me to move to Brooklyn over $100 in parts?”
   • PS, “Well, it looks like you just admitted that this project wasn’t important enough for you to conjure up an excuse to drive to San Jose or Palo Alto.  You didn’t even try to visit a Radio Shack or a Fry’s.  Hell, the time you’ve spent griping about the delays you’ve caused yourself would have been enough for you to drive down to an electronics store and pick up the parts.”
   • CS, “Yeah, at a 50% markup?  Right.  Good plan!”
   • PS, “Okay, which is it?  Did you want the cheapest result or the fastest?  Having chosen an economical middle ground, it seems somewhat silly to blame me that the parts didn’t arrive as fast as fast can be.”
   • CS, “Shut up.”
   • PS, “No, you shut up.”

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