Author: Maker Block

Two new DrawBot links! And an update!

Thanks to Dan Royer, I’ve added two new links to my really huge list of DrawBots.  That brings the total to 28 drawing robots! 1  That’s a really incredible number of people who have shared documentation for their hard work.  Six months ago I wouldn’t have guessed there were more than a dozen such projects on the ‘net.  Clearly, the six-month-younger version of me is a fool.  Thank god I know better, eh?

So, Dan appears to be using an Arduino + Adafruit motor shield, much like I’m using, but he’s running custom Gcode software with a Java GUI.  It looks like Dan was wrestling with the problem of how to maximize drawing speed without causing his ‘bot to hang over the serial connection.  If he gets some decent speed out of his setup, I’m definitely going to give that a shot.

Unfortunately, I haven’t done much in the way of robotic drawings lately.  After experimenting with TSP drawings and finding out they would take an excruciatingly long time I set my drawbot aside for a little while.  Fortunately, Sandy’s been on the case and has worked out a new firmware version that might prove to be twice as fast as the one I’m currently using.

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  1. <queue thunder and lightning> 28! 28 drawing robots!  Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! [↩]

Yup, just three

My daughter asked me the other day about Indiana Jones.  She must have seen an ad or something.  I told her it was a series of movies about an archeologist adventurer.  She asked how many.  I said that no matter what anyone said, there were only three of them.  And none of them had anything to do with aliens.

Funny dream the other night

In the dream I had a few GREAT ideas, so, naturally, I wrote them down.  When I have ideas in a dream and write them down, I find that about 75% of the time the ideas don’t make any sense in the full light of day.

I’ve heard that keeping a dream log helps with lucid dreaming.  I’ve also heard that jotting down ideas helps one keep new ideas flowing.  I’m in the habit of carrying a pen and small pad of paper at just about all times.  Most outgoing e-mails from my phone consist of little notes to myself – half-baked ideas and whatnot.

This particular incident the other night was an amusing combination of the two – jotting down dreams and jotting down ideas.

Except, I jotted down my great ideas in my notebook in my dream.  When I woke up I had no recollection of the ideas themselves, just that they were good enough to have written down.

Well, I thought it was funny anyhow.  :)

Google, why you so creepy?

This is actually my second post with the same subject/topic/title.  :/

As a joke I did a google search for “cell phone for elderly” because a friend of mine has this ridiculous habit of taking pictures with his iPhone UPSIDE down.  Sure, it’s easy enough to turn it back upside right – but wouldn’t it just make more sense to simply hold the phone correctly in the first place?

Anyhow, now all the google ads I see are for cell phones for the elderly.  Great.

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Okay, that was a bad idea…

I missed out on several episodes of The Walking Dead when the second half of season two returned in mid-February.  Since AMC was going to re-air season two episodes before last night’s season finale, I figured I’d just wait until the marathon was mostly over and watch everything, including the finale, without commercials.  The second half of season two was great with all the scares and drama I’d come to expect.

I’m just not sure it was worth an entire nighttime of dreams about trying to surviving the zombie apocalypse.  Lemme tell you, I coulda used a commercial break a few times.