- Radian: grinding away very slowly on asynchronous blocks. It’s discouraging work; I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can wrangle.
- Electric motorcycle: it’s not clear whether it will actually be possible to get this frame registered, so I may have to scrap it and start over. This is less of a problem than it sounds; old non-running motorcycles are plentiful and cheap, and I’m sure I can find another frame that will fit the motor I’ve chosen.
- La petit piège (aka the spiderweb): fundraiser party last weekend went well, and the teaser lights did what they needed to. I’ve ordered the accelerometers for the full-blown modules and we have a work party scheduled for the 29th. This one is going smoothly.
- Floodland: conversation with DNR ongoing. First organizational meeting will be next Wednesday. Time to start recruiting help!
- Google: I still wouldn’t say I’m doing well, exactly, but I’m muddling along as best I can. Still possible that I’ll be fired if I can’t get all this spaghetti untangled, but all I can do is carry on and see what happens.
I don’t have any sewing projects under way right now. ALTSpace is running smoothly and sustaining itself. My gas-burning motorcycle needs some work (valve cover gasket is leaking oil) but I’m going to leave that work to a professional. The meshnet project is ongoing but I’m just showing up to meetings and not really doing any work right now.
I just ordered a Mars Electric ME1003 from EV Drives, a distributor in Port Townsend. This is the most expensive single component in the project, and one which will influence all future design decisions. Now it starts to become real!
A guy with a desk job and a family goes looking for his cooler alternate self:
As a writer, I’d always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man. Often, in books, these physical doubles represent the worst a character is capable of. Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I’d begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I’d started wondering if there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you’ve ever dreamed of becoming. Let’s call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There’s a “you” out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition. So I vowed to hunt down my Cooler Self.
It’s about time to buy the motor for my electric bike project. I have been thinking about the ME0709, since it has the right size and weight, with decent performance characteristics, and has shown up in a number of successful electric bike projects. But as I was shopping around for a place to purchase it, I noticed that the ME1003 is a bolt-in replacement with substantially higher current capacity – it cruises at 200 amps instead of 125 and peaks at 400 amps instead of 300. Same dimensions, it just weighs three more pounds and costs $625 instead of $485. Hmmm. So many decisions to make…
The Allwinner A13 is a 1 GHz Cortex A8 processor in a TQFP package: that is to say it’s a chip with pins sticking out the side, which could be soldered onto a board by hand. This opens up the possibility of constructing a full-blown modern computer of one’s own design, by hand, for the first time since the early 1980s.
I had this idea last year about building a single-board cluster, linking a grid of microcontrollers using their SPI buses… but with a chip like this one, you could get a much higher-powered solution for a very similar price, using the onboard gig-Ethernet as the bus.
From the MIT High-Low Tech Lab, it’s a DIY cellphone made from $150 of easily-available parts. The phone module comes from Sparkfun, the LCD comes from Adafruit, the circuit board was designed with Eagle and can be produced by any fab house, and the case is a laser-cut plywood sandwich.
I overheard someone in the lunch line talking about 3D printers running in a conference room upstairs, and asked what that was about. He apparently happened to have a Makerbot on his desk a couple of years ago, and now the kids just expect to see 3D printers when they visit Google. I commented that they must think Google is awfully futuristic for having such high-tech equipment around – but oh no, he said, they think this stuff is totally normal. They know that plastic things must come from somewhere, so why wouldn’t it be a printer at Google? In fact they complain that the plastic is weird and bumpy, and only comes in one color – it’s only their parents who are impressed.
I said hello to Nathan H.’s daughter Mabry as she was eating lunch. She’s about four years old, and told me that she has a friend with a little brother who is also named “Mars”, who is two. I said that was great, I don’t know anyone else named Mars, and that I looked forward to talking with him some day. “Oh, but he’s only two”, she said; “by then you’ll be really really old, or maybe dead!”
Ordinary things blowing up, in gorgeous, beautifully-lit slow motion: it’s a promotional video for some Danish TV show, but it’s totally grinworthy.
Those fluffy stick-on mohawks for motorcycle helmets are now available with LEDs and fiber optics.
Nicely done light fixture using old-style wire filament bulbs, mason jars, cloth-wrapped wire, redwood planks, and plumbing pipe. Step-by-step build gallery included.
Clever, beautiful use of a laser cutter: custom etched nori squares for elegantly surprising maki-sushi rolls.
We’re having an open house at ALTSpace today. If you’ve been curious about the space and what goes on in it, feel free to come by any time from now until 10 pm. It’s just general open-house time until 6 pm, then we’ll have our one-year anniversary party – beer, wine, snacks, and lots of art to look at!
Oh, yeah: I finally finished the dress for Jeanine, yesterday. I hate hand-sewing and avoid it whenever possible, but this is a semi-formal dress and not sportswear so hemming it via my usual “topstitch it with contrasting thread” strategy wouldn’t really have worked. It’s a lined dress, too, so I had to blind-stitch both the dupioni shell and the charmeuse lining. Ugh. I’m glad that’s over. It looks pretty – I made the lining just a little bit too long, on purpose, so you see a little flash of soft champagne gold at the bottom of the dress, for contrast. This project has taken a while; I was only about half done when I burned through my original stock of enthusiasm, so it’s been grinding along at a much slower pace for the last couple of months.
Current active project list:
- Radian, of course
- Electric motorcycle (still mostly just planning)
- Accelerometer-driven lighting system for “la petite piege” aka the spiderweb
- Floodland (next step: BLM permit)
That’s really it. Kind of a short list, but I think that’s OK: Floodland is the sort of thing that can suck up an arbitrary amount of time, and the electric motorcycle is a pretty large fabrication job too.
ALTSpace is supporting itself, and we’re going to have a first anniversary party on Saturday the 14th. It’s really satisfying to walk in there and see all the projects people are working on. There are clothes hanging on the wire shelves, bits of sculptures out on workbenches, an entire back corner taken over by painters… The Seattle Meshnet people come in every couple of weeks to hack on radios, and the last Dorkbot meeting happened here. I’m delighted to see the place functioning as a hub for creative & social activities.
I’ve been in a funk for the past month or so, but today my mood seems to be lifting. It’s a sunny day, I’m getting things done, and while my work situation is not going the way I had hoped, neither is the mess I’ve made quite the disaster I had feared it might be. Life is actually pretty much OK.
I bought a pair of Firstgear leather motorcycle pants last summer when I started commuting to work via bike again, and they really haven’t held up to steady use. One of the snaps broke, the fly zipper pull broke off, the right side leg zipper pull broke off, and then last week the whole right side zipper broke. I thought about trashing them and getting something more durable, but decided to try upgrading them first. I hammered in a new snap, then cut out the old zippers and replaced them with sturdy, chunky visilon zippers. I didn’t get the stitch line *perfectly* straight but it’s good enough that nobody will notice but me, and the new zippers ought to be substantially more durable than the old ones were.
Today I’m going to put a little more work into the dress I’ve been making for Jeanine. It’s all basically done now save the finish on a couple of interior seams and the actual hem. I’ve been moving very slowly on this project; perhaps I can finally get it done today.
Via boingboing, here’s Best Made: an online catalog of goods with simple, classic designs which are made as competently as possible. I doubt I will buy any of their goods but it is nice to see someone collecting Good Stuff.
From the boingboing comments, Sundial Wire offers that classic thread-covered wire in a variety of colors, plus an assortment of old-fashioned plug styles. It makes me want to make a new version of my mad scientist lamp. (This is apparently kind of a thing now – I am clearly not the only one who was inspired by Nik Willmore’s “Tube Lamp”!)
Running linux on an 8-bit AVR: the author thinks his hand-wired board “may be the cheapest, slowest, simplest to hand assemble, lowest part count, and lowest-end Linux PC”. It is certainly a contender. Of course he accomplished it not by running Linux directly on the AVR, but by writing an ARM emulator – ludicrously slow, but it apparently does work, to the point that you can boot bash and execute commands.
I’ve occasionally fantasized about building a parallel computer using an array of STM32F103 chips – they are 32-bit ARMs running at 72 MHz. They have no memory manager but I had a similar idea for using VMs… it’s hard to see what the point would be, though, other than the experience of building something that is technically a parallel computer by hand.
I met up with Dan Ryan over at ALTSpace and did some radio hacking tonight. He showed Ava and me how to disassemble, reset, and configure the Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco. You can get batches of ‘em on ebay in unknown condition: out of the ten I bought for $60, two worked, six are broken, and two more still need to be tested. Not bad for an hour’s work.
The plan is to use these as part of the new Seattle Meshnet project. It’s not related to the old Seattle Wireless group, but it’s a similar idea: we’re building an unlicensed citywide wireless data network, which will support data sharing and perhaps even act as a backup Internet connection.
The web site is very awkwardly laid out, but there is some useful information in it: a 72-volt electric motorcycle conversion using six lead-acid batteries and the nearly-standard Mars ME0709 motor. He claims top speed of 45 mph and range of 25-30 miles; that’d be plenty for my commute.
Home-built PCB drill press using a Micromot 50 instead of a dremel, the latter apparently having insufficient precision. This is not a CNC device, but hand-operated.
Legit is another frontend for git; this one focuses on simplification of the branch operations.
Ava and I spent the weekend roaming around in Eastern Washington, taking hikes out in the channeled scablands. We dipped our fingers in Soap Lake, let the wind knock us backward from the edge of Dry Falls, cruised through quiet little towns, and walked for miles through cliff-walled canyons watching the birds soar overhead.
