secondsuitor

Well, not soon, more of soon(tm). I ordered my printer, but from a Chinese importer which means it won’t be here for 10-15 days. The price difference was about a 2/3 ratio, so not ignorable. This will give me time to clear room not only for placing it also, but also for putting it together to begin with.

On other news, I’ve started digging into the composition tool at work. That’s… interesting. It’s a fundamental difference between how InDesign did things versus this. Looking at how it does it, it totally makes sense, but still, it’s a lot to work around. I have to deal with the vagaries of HTML and CSS like I haven’t had to do in quite a while. Just getting a paragraph block to grow up from the bottom of a box rather down from the top had multiple people scratching their heads. Figured it out of course… I threw a table in a div and screw those guys.

With the Wif on swing, I’ve been cooking more. Last week I cooked a chicken because no one else was. It came out okay, but a little raw in some places. Last night she had me pick the remnants and then I made dinner delicious chicken stock. I think that’s going to be one of my goals now. No waste, only stock.

So I made a decision and pulled that trigger. The printer should be here in the next 8-21 days or so. This means it’s time to start cleaning. I need to have access to my work bench so I have a place to put it. I also just need to clean. Funny enough, with the Wif at work most evenings I’ve gotten to the point where I’m bored enough that video games barely interest me. I even roasted a chicken today. If I remember, I’ll make either pizza or baked beans tomorrow.

While I’m pretty slow on doing things, as in all the random stuff I get all excited about for a moment of my life at a time, I feel like I’m making progress. A lot of my challenges come from my stinginess. While I know what I need to do something, I then get focused on how to minimize the initial investment, and maximize what I get. Then comes where I decide what I really need, and then reengineer everything. I could build all the parts myself, thereby I spend a little less (maybe) but have something that’s all mine.

The thing is, it’d be a lot easier to do a lot of things with a cheap 3d printer. Is it ideal? Does it matter? A good cheap printer would be a printer I could then make a little better just by printing new parts. This is a violation of my belief in only buying raw ingredients when possible (I loathe that most baked beans recipes require baked beans). On the other hand, it means that if I want to go full reprap, I could. Now to figure out what and where to buy. I don’t need to worry about ABS out the gate as the Wif’s asthma would make PLA be a better plastic for most purposes. Build size needs to be big enough for connective hardware for future builds. I’m not going to worry about final build sizes as I have specific needs which would be best meet with custom gear. A shoe sole is going to be long, narrow, and short. An arm is going to be long, narrow, and short. Since most printers are built for cubic builds, my needs aren’t exactly typical.

As much as I want a CNC, a CNC is going to be loud. It’s going to produce a load of dust in a room with crap all for dust abatement. It’s going to increase the initial build cost without a dramatic return. While I think a CNC is going to be where I’d want to go someday, it’s a bad place to start. Maybe I’ll build a mill for circuit boards, but that’s where I should end my CNC dreams for my work area. Maybe a laser cutter, but that’s a different price range.

So now it’s just honing in on the final, what to buy. And squirrelling away the money. And pulling that trigger.

Ooh. I guess I take a break from..?

I was getting weird behavior from the servo and whiney error messages when uploading scripts. With the assistance of the internet, I found out that not all USB ports are created equal. Obviously there different specs, but also where everything hooks up. Basically, by going through the front I was using a port on a hub, and that was my problem. One I plugged in to the back of my computer, I typed a number, and that’s where it went.

So I got some play it off the servo, but not the movement I was expecting. Is it the wiring? Is it the second? Is it Maybelline?

While I did more work than my normal meh-worthy amount this vacation, I didn’t get as far on my projects as I hoped, which means that my plans for overlording or new robotic overlords is still a process. I think a lot of my challenges comes from the cyclic way I work on things. While it’s great to always come into projects with 90% of fresh eyes and thereby be willing to try something different, it’d also be swell to be able to make that choice for myself rather than let my unfamiliarity with the topic force the new avenues.

Where I’m at? I have my box of motors and stuff. I’ve realized things I should Amazon and am currently building a shipping cart. I’ve started to hook up things experimentally. I have opencv installed and am working through a dozen different tutorials to get it to do the training for the caps.

I currently have the grippers servo plugged into the RedBoard, but I’m getting no movement. I’ll need to look at a few things when I get home: is it the board, the software, or the servo? I should start with the servo as that’ll be easiest to diagnose, as I can just swap the servo. After that, it’ll be the board…

I did dismantle that old power drill I have and am going to start looking at making it a drill press I think. The motor and gearbox are fine if I remember correctly, it’s always the batteries that die first.

I had a 22 and a pint. They were both quite good from Flying Bike, so I’ll be leaving my arm until tomorrow. I’m still thinking of a name. I probably should just look up the name of the AI that was born in Neuromancer and became an artist I’m later Willam Gibson novels… But that almost seems wrong as this won’t have that level of autonomy (yet).

Speaking of novels, I was thinking of one of my favorite quotes:

Huh. Can’t find it. I’ll have to read the collected works of Douglas Adams again. Needle Haystack, GO!

Now to still, imwrite doesn’t create a folder that doesn’t exist, nor does it care the folder doesn’t exist. As a plus note, the continuous swapping of the bottle caps I think qualified me for my physical therapy of the day. Now I can do tomorrow’s also…

I have 200 pictures of beer caps now. Just need to crop them all, grab about twice as many negatives (though that’s way easy enough as they can be anywhere and anything) and get processing.

Right. Cropping them is being annoying. Cropping an image takes a few seconds, but a few seconds adds up. I’m trying to get a utility called imageclipper to play nice, but so far it won’t run. Now to try building it myself. That’s taking longer than I’d like as well because one of the libraries it uses had to be gotten first, but it’s behind a 60k file zip…

Screw it. I’m doing it by hand for the minute. I’ll get it pre-existing, and see how far along I get in the processing of the actual Cascade in the morning.

Python is fully installed with numpy and opencv sans virtual environment. Plugged in my baby webcam and was able to capture video and stills. I started digging into doing the actual recognition, but I had to compile stuff from scratch (or at least my initial look around didn’t come up with the executable I needed). I then whipped out Visual Studio for the first time in my life, and Microsoft managed to do something that was a pleasant surprise. I pointed it at the force folder and it wallet to build everything after automatically running the cmake configure script. This was a total surprise. To be clear though, yesterday Microsoft also asked me my opinion on a desktop notification. I answered. Sternly. So yesterday was more like Mehcrosoft.

I might have parts show up today, but I have other things to do so I’ll probably have to wait until later if not another day to start pushing things.