DrawBot – The Assembly, Part V

I just finished soldering the Adafruit Motor Shield … this time with all the bits in the correct places.  The Adafruit directions are incredibly detailed, I just soldered a few parts in wrong like an idiot last time. This time it went much smoother and much quicker.

I just wired up the two steppers, plugged in the power adapter, plugged in the USB cable, uploaded the Polargraph firmware, fired up the Polargraph software, and asked it to try to draw something.  And it started to twitch away in what appeared to be a meaningful pattern!!!

Huzzah!

Now… for sleep!

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DrawBot – The Delivery, Part VI

Okay, that was FAST.  I ordered the Adafruit motor shield from MakerBot on 1/26/2012 just after midnight and it arrived today a little after noon.  That’s about two-and-a-half days for the parts to be packed, shipped, make it from Brooklyn, NY to Oakland, CA and then to my secret robot lair in the Bay Area.1  While at the hardware store today I picked up some small eyescrews and new tips for my soldering iron.  Tonight I’ll assemble the board.  Again.

I can honestly say that I was mightily tempted to purchase a third motor shield along with this second.  However, as I have no immediate designs on a secondary DrawBot2 I’m not ready to admit the possibility of defeat.  In the words of Kongorilla, I will not fail.3

Actually, now that I’ve got these new soldering iron tips, I stand a chance of being able to desolder the mis-soldered parts. 4 My old soldering tips were old, tarnished, and somewhat crusty.  The soldering tip I’m replacing is all of these things plus it is in the rough shape of a flathead screwdriver. 56

Wish me luck!

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    • Delivered, January 28, 2012, 12:09 pm, [SECRET ROBOT LAIR], CA [9XXXX]
    • Out for Delivery, January 28, 2012, 8:14 am, [SECRET ROBOT LAIR], CA [9XXXX]
    • Sorting Complete, January 28, 2012, 8:04 am, [SECRET ROBOT LAIR], CA [9XXXX]
    • Arrival at Post Office, January 28, 2012, 5:17 am, [SECRET ROBOT LAIR], CA [9XXXX]
    • Depart USPS Sort Facility, January 28, 2012, OAKLAND, CA 94615
    • Processed through USPS Sort Facility, January 28, 2012, 2:26 am, OAKLAND, CA 94615
    • Electronic Shipping Info Received, January 27, 2012
    • Depart USPS Sort Facility, January 27, 2012, BETHPAGE, NY 11714
    • Processed at USPS Origin Sort Facility, January 26, 2012, 11:40 pm, BETHPAGE, NY 11714
    • Accepted at USPS Origin Sort Facility, January 26, 2012, 10:25 pm, BROOKLYN, NY 11217

    [↩]

  2. I’ll want to make sure I can get this first one sorted before I try [↩]
  3. Actually, that’s a little more bravado than I’m really capable of.  If I fail, I fail – I just have no intention of ending at failure.  Rather, I’m committing to repeated failures … until I end up with a working DrawBot [↩]
  4. Gah, why didn’t I pick up a desoldering pump while I was out today?! [↩]
  5. And chipped, at that. [↩]
  6. It’s really quite a miracle I got the first board soldered at all in the first place. [↩]

I had a dream last night

One of my favorite songs has this line in it, so I just like saying and writing it.  So much so that I’ve used that same exact title for three posts, including this one.

Okay, so, in this dream a huge package arrived from MakerBot.  It contained a bunch of spools different colored plastics, a brand-spanking new Replicator, and a galvanized steel industrial strength sewing machine as big as a saw horse.  I’ve never seen a sewing machine that big, so it was entirely an invention of my mind.  And, now that I think about it, I don’t even know how it would even work.  I recall thinking, in my dream, that the thing was strong enough to sew a stack of denim jeans together.

Um, there’s not much else to this post.  I suppose the dream was probably about my excitement over a new delivery from MakerBot so I can finish my DrawBot and the prospect of getting a Replicator one day. 1

  1. I think now that we have two 3D printing robots, Bender the Cupcake CNC and Flexo the Thing-O-Matic, an Egg-Bot, and I’m in the process of building a drawing robot my wife has caved to the sense of inevitability that whatever new robot MakerBot produces I will buy. [↩]

Twitter.com Frame Escaping Code

<script>
function bust () {
  document.write = "";
  window.top.location = window.self.location;
  setTimeout(function() {
    document.body.innerHTML = '';
    }, 0);
  window.self.onload = function(evt) {
    document.body.innerHTML = '';
  };
}
if (window.top !== window.self) { // are you trying to put self in an iframe?
  try {
    if (window.top.location.host) { // this is illegal to access unless you share a non-spoofable document domain
      // fun times
    } else {
      bust(); // chrome executes this
    }
  } catch (ex) {
    bust(); // everyone executes this
  }
}
</script>

Late Night Musings

I have a feeling this might be a long-ish post.  Buckle up!

There’s a line from one of Douglas Adams books that I just love to quote.  I don’t just love to quote this bit, I love to say it fast.  I don’t just love to say it fast, I love to say it fast to people as I’m taking my leave. 1  But, it’s also a way to wish someone well.2  Here it is, “Do what you do.  Do it well.  Win awards.”

I find myself in a ponderous state of mind having watched that little Youtube video of a woman building her own TARDIS.  A few short weeks after posting that video she posted another video about how shocked and pleased she was to have gained 5000 subscribers on Youtube.  I think I’m not really all that surprised at that success.

Here’s the thing – the “risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” … the attitudes of such people is just plain infectious.  When you see someone just put their all into something, you can’t help but be caught up in their enthusiasm.  Perhaps it is just all this sharing?  Perhaps it becomes easier to empathize, to revel in another’s victory and wince at their failures when they’re sharing every little piece of themselves along the way.

When I look across the blogs, pictures, videos I’ve seen over the last few years from the Maker movement I can’t help but think about how almost heartbreakingly honest they are. 3456

I guess here’s what I’m thinking is that if this Maker movement has taught me anything at all, it is that no matter what – you should find what you love to do and do it as hard as you can. 789

  1. I suppose this much is self-indulgence and looking to amuse myself. [↩]
  2. Sort of. [↩]
  3. I’ve tried to teach my daughter not to be afraid of failure, but to embrace it.

    Tonight she was having trouble fitting some building toys together and getting very frustrated with them.  I asked her if yelling or getting angry would help.  She, of course, replied that they wouldn’t help.  Then I asked her if she thought her mother or father ever got frustrated.  She didn’t think we did.  I told her that we did all the time – but that it’s how we deal with that frustration that’s important.  I told her I get frustrated sometimes when I’m designing something for us to print on our robot, or when I’m programming, or when we’re trying to fix something – but that the best thing to do is always just try another way.

    I know she doesn’t entirely grasp these concepts yet, she is after all only five.  I’m sure she sometimes thinks of me as that jerk who, when she asks for help, tries to engage her with a bunch of Socratic questions rather than just helping.

    Then again, she managed to completely assemble an exact replica of the object in her building toy instructions without my intervention. [↩]

  4. It’s so funny being a dad.   There’s this little person living in our house…  I have shoes older than her.  I’ve known her all her entire life.  And for those very earliest years when I’ve known her so very well, she’ll probably only have the very dimmest recollections of me.  This I say without any trace of melancholy – I am quite hopeful and cheerfully optimistic that I’m really going to like the creative, intelligent, and sensitive person she’s probably going to be. I’m also hopeful that one day she might find her way to this blog and see some of the nonsense that I’ve written. [↩]
  5. Admittedly, a bunch of this stuff I’ve written here, as with a half-ill-advised e-mail, I would feel so very self conscious about. [↩]
  6. Uh, where was I? [↩]
  7. And, perhaps win awards. [↩]
  8. Tying that all back together was entirely serendipitous. [↩]
  9. Subconscious? [↩]

She built her own TARDIS!

I just can’t help it.  I’m such a sucker for DIY Doctor Who stuff.1

Until now I had only known about Project Dalek for people who wanted to build replica Daleks.  I suppose I should have known, but never thought to have looked it up, that there’s a whole website devoted to building TARDIS’s.  This lady’s build log on that site is nearly as entertaining as her Youtube video.

  1. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…  Exhibit A! [↩]

Articles on writing WordPress Plugins

Looking back at one’s code from years prior is like looking back at a junior high school picture of one’s self.  I’m looking back at the code for my quick-and-dirty pie chart plugin and think, man, why did I write things THAT way?

In the 1,000 years since I wrote that plugin in 2009, I’ve been trying to learn and comply with best programming practices for WordPress plugins.  As a result my current plugins tend to be stripped down, simple, don’t create unnecessary options, don’t create unnecessary tables, taxonomies, special post types, or those kinds of things. 1  Learning some Object Oriented programming along the way has been super helpful.  By encapsulating your WordPress plugin code into a chunk of objected oriented programming, you reduce the likelihood that your plugins’ function and variable names will collide with those from WordPress or other potential plugins.

If you’re getting started or need to brush up on your WordPress plugin development skillz, you should definitely check out these awesome articles:2

I’d also recommend tinkering with jQuery and JSON, if you haven’t already. 3  I don’t know of any really good JSON tutorials, so if you do, please let me know so I can add it to this list.

  1. Admittedly, I’m not really shooting for super ambitious plugins either. [↩]
  2. Mostly stolen from the WordPress Codex! [↩]
  3. I only use JSON for passing data from the browser to the server via AJAX and then decoding into a PHP object. [↩]

Simple Series with SEO! after just one day

I’m really happy to report that per the WordPress.org stats, this little post series plugin has been downloaded more than 100 times so far.  That’s really awesome.  And, now that I’ve figured out how to work this wacky SVN thing, I think it would be fun to release some of the other random little plugins I’ve developed over the last few years.

As of the latest version 1.4, the plugin is now easy to modify with some CSS added to your stylesheet.  I could have added this as a text field option a settings page for the plugin, but I really like the stripped down simplicity of the plugin as is.  Even with all the comment lines in the plugin, it is only 53 lines of code.  If super short code were a goal1 I could probably cut that in half.2

Now I have to find some of my old plugins that others might find useful.  I’ve got one for frame escaping, one for making pie charts…  I know there are a few other random ones as well.

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  1. And it isn’t [↩]
  2. Obviously, I’m not going to do this since it would make the code next to illegible [↩]