Posted by Robert Ying at 2:39 pm on September 27, 2010
I’ve been working on a new robot of late, taking the controller and parts from the older one and placing them into a new chassis and system. Lacking time to work on a new h-bridge circuit, I’m actually using an Ardomoto shield from SparkFun, which takes care of most of the wiring for me, and also uses a more powerful L298 h-bridge. If you look carefully, you’ll see one of my breadboard Arduinos in there, it’s currently only there to interpret the Nunchuk readings and to control the RGB LEDs in front. In the future, it’ll be used for the PID control, which I have yet to implement. It’s connected to the main Arduino Mega clone with I2C, running at 100KHz.
Posted by Robert Ying at 7:25 pm on September 25, 2010
Life’s been… busy. SAT2′s, PSAT’s, SAT’s, AP’s, how I hate you collegeboard. I didn’t get to go to the Speech’n'Debate tourney this weekend, and as a result my male parental unit has decided to stack a few tens of hours of work upon me. Physics was fun at first… it was around problem #29 that it became monotonous, and something like #94 when it became hell. Twelve hours of pure physics, and he still wants me to work on Chemistry (AP and SAT2) and APLAC and APUSH and such… life’s not very fun this wknd.
I hope, I really do, that school’s going to be better than this on Monday. Is it too much to ask for an hour of time that doesn’t cost a few hours of sleep? Its one thing to pressure me for club registrations… but it really doesn’t help if he still forbids me from going to club meetings… which doesn’t work out, as everyone should know.
It’s like all that matters is page after page after page after page of sciences and academics. When I ask for a reprieve, the answer is invariably “Later. Go back to [subject]“… I think this weekend was supposed to be one of such “Later”s, even if it didn’t happen.
My catharsis of late has been music, late at night, a few minutes of melody. The few strains I can access without discovery let me relax for a little, in return for a loss of just that much time. Fair trade, I say… wish I didn’t need it.
Maybe I’ll talk to some of you around two in the morning… tis when I can guarantee I’m mostly finished.
Posted by Robert Ying at 5:00 pm on September 20, 2010
I’ve burnt out a few Arduinos recently, and have found it expedient to just build my own on a breadboard rather than pay $34.95 and buy an Arduino Duemilanove online. It’s cheaper ($7.40, without FTDI or breadboard, SparkFun), and easy to fix if something goes wrong. Note that this tutorial does NOT include a voltage regulator, power will come from the FTDI board.
All prices are from SparkFun, which is NOT the cheapest. Note that the capacitor and the SparkFun FTDI can be reused across many boards, and thus the costs is divided among all the boards you build.
Posted by Robert Ying at 11:57 am on September 18, 2010
I don’t understand today’s music selections. The “Top 40″ list seems to be some eclectic mix of rap and pop, and very few of those do it well. I wonder where the attraction comes from. It’s strange, really, how all the popular songs follow some set formula, along the lines of this:
pop (15sec) + rap (30 sec) + pop (15 sec) + rap (until 15sec before the end) + pop (15 sec)
For example:
What’s so pleasing about a man yelling out the lines to a badly composed poem? What happened to melodies, to an actual tune, to the background instruments? Sure, the beat from the big bass drum is nice, and quite catchy, yes. Is it worth three minutes of wasted time? As far as I can tell, the only music that’s really music these days comes from movie soundtracks, because you just can’t have the dramatic effects without an accompanying orchestral arrangement.
Come on… just think about Inception’s soundtrack
It’s not fancy, it’s not complex. But without it, would Inception be nearly as good?
Today’s music is a combination of a drum set and autotune. There’s very little redeeming about it, and yet it still is a huge industry in this country… What’s wrong with the world?
Also, somebody want to tell me what the point of all the DRM stuff is about? It’s not like they’re ever going to get rid of the analog hole… It’s not really possible to, either. So long as there’s a mic input and a speaker output, a crossover cable will easily get you a full recording. If thats the case, why bother? People who like the artist will buy the songs, all others will use YouTube or torrent it.
