Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Maker Faire 2008 Day One is over and done with. The show feels like it is about twice the size of last year. The scale of awesomeness is definitely 2x.

There have been a number of changes beyond the scale.

The various displays/booths have been re-organized and the organization makes sense.

The event took over the back parking lot of the fairgrounds and, as such, there is lots of room for various fire arts, very large statue stuff, and various outdoor events.

Gone are the generic arts-and-crafts vendors from the years before, replaced with various “activist” vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth) to awesome chocolates to composting toilets to amazing beer.

The food is awesome this year. While the various carny style food-vendors-that-you-see-at-every-character-lacking-street-fair are still there, you’ll find awesome little bay area food vendors in between. What really good tacos? No problem; beef, whole roasted pork, or braised lamb cheeks — all delicious. Home made yucatan peninsula style tamales, too. Oh, and fresh grilled organic asparagus with a delicious dressing is just around the corner.

Many vendors — TechShop, O’Reilly, EMSL, etc.. — seem to have made the transition from “hey, look, cool stuff” to “hey, look, cool stuff and here is where you can pay some $$ to participate”. Seriously — the show is starting to take on an air of professional marketeering. Only it is still all good– there are many more opportunities to make cool stuff for free than ever before.

The whole show is about interaction. And interact, you do!

Oddly, there are many more decent pinball players this year than last. I’m looking forward to comparing this years audits with the first year’s.

Of course, there is still the grand assortment of kids being exposed to well maintained pinball machines for the first time. Their first reaction is generally “ooh, what is this?!?!?”. Then it becomes all concentration. And, finally, it is the parents reminding them that there is lots of other cool stuff to see!

Awesome stuff. I took a handful of photos in between chatting with many folks about pinball machine restoration.

I’m utterly beat. Have no words. Here are a couple of more pictures. Off to bed to charge up for tomorrow!

This is a perpetual pinball chaos machine. Balls bounce around and trigger lights depending on which color pop bumper is hit.

This little girl met R2D2 and decided to have a dance.

The creator of the amazing artoo detoo robot — Chris — commented with a link to a video of the same dance event.

Thank you!

The New York Times has an awesome article about Gary Stern of Stern Pinball, the last pinball manufacturing company around. This may not be entirely true. There was a company in Australia that bought the rights to a bunch of Bally/Williams IP and is supposed to re-making some classics, but they seem to have disappeared (or it might have been a scam — I honestly don’t know what happened).

Pictured at left is Addams Family. It was the most popular pinball machine ever made, selling 22,000 machines (which is more than Stern’s entire annual production run, these days). Pat Lawlor, the designer, is now at Stern and continues to design some truly great tables.

I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that most pinball machines are sold individuals and placed in homes. The economy of route operated — corner store / pub — pinball machines was always based on conflict that was quite easily resolved by simply replacing all the machines with video games. Lower maintenance, less square footage, easier to move, and easier to simply swap software (these days) to “upgrade” the play experience.

I currently own 2 machines; Cyclone and Addams Family SPecial Collectors Edition.

Both are fully restored and both will be appearing at next month’s Maker Faire, along with a Dr. Who that I restored a few years ago and gave to a friend.

I may likely also be bringing a PIN-BOT. It is quite thoroughly beat and is going to be the target of some radical restoration experiments, I think.

At left is a simple EMSL AtmegaXX8 Target Board (same board I have written about before) 3 bit up/down counter circuit.

Push the left button? Counts down. Push the right button? Counts up.

Simple.

Sort of.

The switches are fully debounced using an extremely elegant algorithm that I ran across while trying to figure out how to efficiently debounce switches with an AVR controller.

Specifically, the software uses a vertical stack count to efficiently debounce up to 8 switches in very few instructions and only 3 bytes of memory.

Read on for schematic and a description of the software…

Read the rest of this entry »

So, by now, you are well aware that Sony was charging $150 ($100 for the right version of Vista + $50 for the cleaning service) and that they dropped the $50 charge because, well, it was asinine. Or a mistake.

Not going to go there. What I found interesting is this:

The Fresh Start feature is described on Sony’s site as a system optimization service where specific VAIO applications, trial software and games are removed from your unit prior to shipment.

Once selected, the feature is described in the BTO options (along with anywhere from 1 to 5 “None” items. Huh?) as Fresh Start™ (removal of specific VAIO® applications, trial software and games).

Wait. What? removal? are removed from?

That implies that they were installed in the first place. So, Sony is installing the software and then removing it afterwords?

That seems a bit odd. And potentially error prone. What are the chances that the uninstall process actually uninstalls everything?

Seems odd. I suspect that Sony ended up in this situation because they have a contract somewhere that stipulates what must be installed on their systems. And Fresh Start works by finding a value-add loophole somehow that allows Sony to subsequently remove the bits o’ adware and call it a product.

Whacky.

Well, multitasking would be stretching it…

When writing AVR micro-controller code, you typically end up with something like this:

int main(void) {
	... initialization code ...
	while(1) {
		... main loop that never exists here ...
	}
}

The main loop spins forever and is generally the bit of code that updates various output ports based on program state. It might likely also read inputs, too. And it might contain bits of code that delays execution for a while. And it is very likely rife with conditionals that’ll cause any given pass through the loop to very in execution time.

Not a very good place to do time sensitive stuff like, say, debouncing a button press or responding to other user events.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before dealing with switches and debouncing switches, I wanted to add a second LED to the circuit.

Trivial:

#include <avr/io.h>
#include <util/delay.h>

int main(void) {
    DDRB = 255U; // Make all PB* -- PORT B -- pins output
    PORTB = 0x0; // turn all PB* -- PORT B -- pins off.

    while (1) {
        PORTB = 0x1; // B0 on, B1 off
        _delay_ms(200);
        PORTB |= 0x2; // B0 and B1 on
        _delay_ms(100);
        PORTB = 0x2; // B0 off, B1 on
        _delay_ms(200);
        PORTB = 0X0; // All off
        _delay_ms(2500); // 2.5 seconds off
    }
}

Each on/off port is represented by a single bit. So, each of the pins in PORTA, PORTB, PORTC, or PORTD — assuming they are in straight digital input/output mode and whatever AVR chip you are targeting has enough pins to have 4 port sets — will be controlled by a single bit in one of four bytes.

Clearly, some macros to toggle bits are in order. Now, it turns out that macros to toggle bits are a big source of contention amongst the AVR development community. They hide too much magic, or so they say, and, if you are going to be programming embedded systems, you ought to be comfortable with C level bit twiddling, damnit.

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Ben picked up a ton of SIP machine pin sockets from Halted recently.

I grabbed about 200 from him and populated my EMSL Atmega target board with enough to provide for both on-board prototyping and to easily break out to a bread, board when needed.

Each point accepts a 24 gauge (or so) wire quite nicely. Makes for easy prototyping while not obscuring the documentation silkscreen on the board.

Next up?

I have all the parts needed to replace an entire flipper circuit in any modern Williams/Bally pinball machine.

Thus, I should have enough parts to drive a solenoid or flash-lamp from the AVR micro-controller.

First, though, I’ll flash some LEDs in response to button presses, though. All one voltage and relatively little chance of blowing up chips, bulbs, or shocking myself.

Once that works, I’ll wire up higher voltage / current drivers. I figure I ought to be able to both replace the flipper drivers with a much more maintainable system while also adding some automatic diagnostics that will light some LEDs inside the pinball when the flippers need to be rebuilt or maintained.

With the recent release of the MacBook Air, there have, of course, been a flurry of reviews and, more relevant to this particular blog post, armchair quarterback style conjecturing as the relevance of the Air’s design within the current marketplace.

Not surprisingly, many of the reviews or commentaries mention The Apple Cube, pictured at left (photo courtesy of wikipedia).

At Daring Fireball, Gruber’s article said in a footnote:

Arguably, the main problem with the G4 Cube had nothing to do with its technical specs, price, or aesthetic appeal, but rather that its case was overly prone to cracking and/or unsightly injection mold lines. I.e., the Cube’s fatal flaw was in the design and engineering of its case.

Close, but not quite. Near the end of the cube’s manufacturing lifecycle, Cubes were on closeout and my company picked up 10 or so to use as general purpose workstations. None of them had noticeable cracking or mold lines.

However, the very design of the cube was fatally flawed.

In particular, the cube sacrificed function in the name of form.

To be blunt: Gorgeous to look at, absolute pain in the ass to live with.

The design was such that anything requiring a cable change was inconvenient. You had to physically tilt the machine over, often all the way onto its side, connect/disconnect the cables, and then very carefully re-route all the cables through the little gap in the back.

The top wasn’t much better. The top featured both the slot for the optical drive and the power button. Unless you paid careful attention, it was damned easy to brush the power button when dropping in or removing a disc.

Worse, the top of the machine was a magnet for dirt, hair and cats. Hair would fall across the optical drive slot and then get sucked right into the drive when you inserted a disc.

And, yes, cats. My friend had a cube at his home. The cats would love to sit on top of the nice, warm, flat cube. Which would both fill it with cat hair and turn it off… then on… then off… then on… then off for as long as the cuts stuck around. He finally had to put one of those pigeon guard kind of strip of nail things on top of the cube to keep the cats from corrupting his filesystem!
(People seem to think I actually take the cat thing as a serious criticism or design flaw. Please. It was funny, that is almost all. Certainly, if the cube had been marketed like the iMac, it would have been a consideration — not a big one, but a consideration none the less.)

The cube was certainly a gorgeous piece of engineering. As a piece of art, it deserved all the awards it received.

However, as a computing device, it really sucked.

Update (responding to comments) on the full post…

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At left is a big pile of mushrooms that Roger found in our yard after a heavy rain. That rather large pile pretty much shot out of the ground overnight, as far as we could tell.

As we wandered about, we realized it was but one of many piles of shrooms of similar magnitude in around our house and, even, in the neighborhood.

Fungus is awesome stuff. Lurking about under the soil until the fruiting conditions are just right and then — boom — shroom city!

I reprocessed this particular photo with Aperture 2.0 using the RAW 2.0 processor combined with the various other tools. The results are far, far more pleasing (to me) than anything I could have done with Aperture 1.x.

Awesome update. Congratulations and a huge thank you to the team that worked so hard on it!!

This was the first photo that I shoved through the Aperture 2.0 pipeline. I really wasn’t happy with what I could do with it in Aperture 1.x; it just didn’t feel right.

It was striking how different the result was from simply switching to the 2.0 RAW processor. The background was brighter and there was considerably more gradation in the color fringes on the out-of-focus lights. From there, I could increase the contrast and still maintain the shades of white on the lights.

Or something like that. I’m pretty clueless about this stuff, but I totally dig Aperture 2.0. It just feels more efficient and more effective.

As I have written before, I picked up an HD DVD player as it was the cheapest way to vie the BBC’s The Planet Earth (HD DVD) in full 1080p HD.

At that time, it was still unclear which of the new formats would win. No longer. HD DVD is dead.

Good riddance.

I had also configured netflix to send HD DVDs when available.

Even though Netflix isn’t going to dump HD DVD for another few months, I turned that preference off last night.

Why?

Because 5 of the 6 HD DVDs we received from Netflix locked up during playback due to relatively minor damage to the disk. The 6th skipped a couple of times.

The format is fragile. Horribly fragile. Old school DVDs with more damage play back just fine, including on my HD DVD player. And the user experience sucks; slow to load, mandatory “web updates”, and “unskippable” ads abound.

From what I have read, Blu-Ray discs are slightly tougher and generally have the same user experience. Still, I couldn’t care less.

As long as Apple makes good on the promise to continue building out the library of content in the movie rental store, the Apple TV 2.0 find / rent / watch user experience is orders of magnitude more pleasant than dealing with physical media.