Greetings List Lurkers,
Well, at least the weekend sucked. Based upon a weekend of guilt leading
to exhaustion and recrimination the family unit managed to get the taxes
filed by this morning. I gotta stop being beaten up by my own sense of
equity, and go the heck outside...
This is the official notice of the Barre Open Systems Institute (BOSI) Adult
Swim. The swim stars at 5:00 PM EST, our latest pomp being to include a goggle
hangout https://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1 until 7:00 PM EST.
The google-cast may actually be a little bit better this session, as we have
actually not only have DNS (yay!) but we are expecting as a special guest
Mark Kline to be G+ing in from Minnesota.
EnGenius directional 801.11 G distance WAN is not the coolest thing of the
year, but clearly the coolest thing for the month of April. As we
mentioned last week, the test link from Hedding to Pellet House worked very
well. These things are very cool. The radio links for 802.11 can go about
2 miles, we are looking for other test sites.
The coolest thing of the month of March, the RaspBMC or OpenELEC on a
Raspberry Pi is still very cool in April. You need this on one of your
flat screen HDMI inputs, get this and do it, is all I can say, we may try
to demo this at today's geek meet. However let us not forget the bootable
Linux Mint 14 usb stick, with the gnome interface, is still very cool (for
February, I suppose).
This week, many things have been in play. Now that the opto isolators as
well as the right controller are now here for the snobot. We can consider
testing what Bit Ed helped us figure out about how to cascade Arduino
motor control shield H-bridges to the Big Ass FETS (BAFs) that run the two
control motors. Elves are frantically documenting the interface, and a
stationary test platform is in the works. Yarger has been buzy liberating
the magic white smoke from various of the snowbot components. Now that
the Damn Taxes are done maybe we can take a shot at this.
At the risk of repetition, the theory here is you can graduate from a toy
car to a robot and not change a thing in software. So where the opto
isolators come in, is we hook them to a motor shield in order to cascade
the Arduino motor shield H-bridges to the BAFs (Big Ass Fets) on the
snobot (ne powered wheelchair) controller. This will no doubt be placed
in one of the new wire-mould boxes that allow for a roomy enclose of the
Arduino and a few shields. These big boxes allow for a very nice fit, and
pix shall be posted on G+ and the web site. The old skinny wire-mould
boxes are to end up in the furmon project. We are currently trying to
order the double wide Wiremould boxes for PI's (still sounds like a
trailer park...) the big size ones are the most promising. We faded a
week due to Uncle Sam and the IRS but continue to watch this space for
action next week.
Right now the Raspberry Pi enclosure the idea for is to use an old 5.25" floppy
box, this works great, again, I expect to get this up as pictures. Do not
forget, if you try this mount the pi pretty far from the edges as you will need
as much as one inch connector clearance. The Wiremould "Trailer Park"
project may change my mind about this as an ideal enclosure.
We hope to expand use of "Andro-Mouse", which is a series of apps for an
Android controller and a Java controlled. This is very slick and Chris
has set up a web page which we will examine and publish at todays meeting,
with any luck.
The "tsp" site has been updated: http://docbox.flint.com:8081/tsp there
are now live shots and consolidated shots of the working beasts (look at
the first three links off this site). One goal is to get the pictures
better organized, and we expect to have pictures of the spiffy new
enclosure. You will find on the site the actual programs that exploit the
python miniterm class to gather data from the Arduino based temperature
sensors via the USB. The software interface between the Arduino and mrtg
is solid and have what we need in that department. This baby is done for
the first phase, now for the rewrite...
With mrtg you can trend the sample data, and this is an example that shows you
how to configure MRTG to display this date. That said, we should have gotten
back to thinking about all the other projects, Javascript, the snowbot and
Robots Rules. We are making No progress...(damn you Netflix, Ras-XBMC,
and the IRS!).
The radio link work from the pellet furnace is now on the pbug development
system. This is a milestone since we now have live data to play with. For
more information see the furmon site as detailed below. The software
should launch any minute now or maybe later. We just got an 802.11
transmitter that can replace the point-to-point system, this has been
tested, but has not been put online.
The ever growing list of projects includes:
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/furmon - monitor that pellet furnace.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/arduino - moving in the arduino groove
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/javajive - to get better at Javascript
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/tsp - Temperature Sensors Project
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/robotsrules - The quest for Roberts Rules - - -
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash - Yea, I am not kidding...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/mrtg - remedial raw mrtg for the slow...
Otherwise, Barre indeed remains a great venue for a Linux and Open Source
Software meeting and general system rejuvenation. That said, we expect to
assemble more of the Dallas Semi "1-wire" temperature probes, and we have
two Arduinos, with lots of fixin's as well as several Raspberry Pi's and a
boat load of radio modules.
Needless to say the Arduino remains the coolest thing for 2012, the Raspberry
Pi the coolest thing this year, and Ras-BMC the coolest thing for the
month of March...
Do not forget that the Barre library stocks "Linux World", and the latest issue
is here. The DVD's are available to checkout and copy, as I just made isos of
each and every one.
Anyway, come and do open source stuff. For more information about the BOSI
Adult Swim meeting time and location try this:
http://family.flint.com/adult_swim_location/index_html
Show up at the the Hedding United Methodist Church Basement if you have
questions or are interested in Linux or the concept of free and open systems,
The basement of the Hedding UMC facility is actually working out pretty well.
If you wish to be included on the "Linux_adult_swim" mailing list, send a
response to this note. Note that the mailing list system is a bit peevish
right now. Let me know if you have any difficulties. Note that I will be
updating the list-server by next week.
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
/************************************
Based upon email reliability concerns,
please send an acknowledgment in response to this note.
Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://www.flint.com/home
skype: flintinfotech
(802) 479-2360 Home
(802) 595-9365 Cell
Consilium _
gratuitum .~. ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
valet /V\ against HTML e-mail X
quanti /( )\ www.asciiribbon.org / \
numerantur ^^-^^
_______________________________________________
Linux_adult_swim mailing list
[email protected]
http://docbox.flint.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux_adult_swim
