Greetings List Lurkers,
CHINESE FIRE DRILL
(No offense to the Peoples Republic)
Our inestimable Sargent-at-arms, Bret (Solifix) will follow the October
frost and is off on an adventure in the southlands. He will be departing
on Thursday 5 October from the Rutland Municipal Bus Terminal. One must
embark on adventure, thus he has all of our best wishes, as well as a
ride that morning..
VISUAL BASH
Is devoting all your time to developing a framework a good way to live?
So here is the story. #1 and only son showed up this summer and coerced me
into buying an Openbuilds C-Bream
(http://openbuildspartstore.com/openbuilds-c-beam-machine/) cnc router, as
well as a really nice router tool to put in the beast. The summer passes
and while much progress is made in the world of 3Dprinting, the router is
labeled as "broken" and sorta ignored for a couple of months.
I finally got around to trying to figure it out, and after some cursory
research and correspondence, such as this:
To test your steppers, Connect to it using any Grbl host
(grblpanel, ugs, bcnc, cncjs, chilipeppr, cncweb4, etc) and use
the Jog buttons to move the motors.
So I say this is a USB device can I talk to it with minicom?
We reached out to our technical department and they stated the
following:
You can, but Minicom would be a less ideal method, than say a proper CNC
host (like github.com/LaserWeb/LaserWeb4-Binaries/releases (works with
lasers, and CNCs, and has AppImage builds that works on Debian), or
bCNC, Chilipeppr, etc - which all have Linux builds these days.
This really annoys me. Thus I realized that what I needed was some kind
of diagnostic program to run this thing. This gave birth to the following
VisualBash code:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/3Dprint/#ctob.sh
What I did learn was that the hardware was indeed not that broken.
Apparently within the CNC Xpro V3 controller stepper driver:
http://openbuildspartstore.com/cnc-xpro-v3-controller-stepper-driver/
There exists a whole slew of values that need to be set right, and somehow
during the handling of this card, there had been enough software glitches
to actually cause the card to forget most of the settings, so I wrote
enough functionality into the ctob.sh program to allow you to examine
these values as well as to upload a set of new values.
Now I need to exercise this cnc system to figure out if the issue with
glitching has gone away... Like just now I was trying to recall the
version of this software and the damn thing hung. I gotta go reset it!
(Grumbling old man goes out of heated section of house to reset cnc
gizmo, more grumbling... old man returns...:^)
So the version of the code the Openbuilds CNC Xpro V3 controller stepper
driver is running is:
Grbl 1.1f
[VER:1.1f.20170131:]
[OPT:V,15,128]
It is not the friendliest code I have ever dealt with (let me suggest that
"help is cheap"), but I now with visual bash and ctob.sh I have a way of
dealing with it.
So with regard to the "glitching" which could it be?
1. Some hardware gremlin or
2. A software thing fixed by the new version of the code?
Thus with Visual Bash at my side, the saga continues..
I take great comfort in VisualBash.
Say what you want but spell it correctly...
As you may surmise, I have been trying to develop and popularize the
VisualBash framework. Despite my own incompetence, we still have use of
the "VisualBash.org" domain name, which is quite a relief. I have tried in
vain to get an article posted about VisualBash on Wikipedia, but do not
seem to have the "psudeo-savvy" necessary to satisfy their editors. So I
need help. Any of you who can, write about VisualBash either on Wikipedia
or other blogs, I would very much appreciate it.
The BOSI Adult Swim meeting today is again at 40 Washington Street, Barre, VT
05641. We shall again meet tonight at our usual place and time if you need to
know more see below...
TECHNORUBBLE
We did arrive and shine at Shelburne Farms in Champlain last weekend (Sept
23-24). Despite the conspiracy on the part of the trailer tires, and my
inability to tie a tarp down. We arrived and returned with minimum loss.
At risk of repetition, We met interesting folks and we want to welcome
YourDuino.com to our mailing list. As part of the trip with Brett We
shall hopefully get down and see the Maker Space in Rutland. Would it be
nice to do the same thing here in Barre! (http://bbbvt.org/)
Technorubble at Libraries.
At the meeting back in February, J West came up with this angle and I would
very much like to try to set TechnoRubble up at the Kellog Hubbard, Kimball and
the Aldrich Libraries and see if this would work. I may also try to get some
traction at the Kellogg Hubbard.
I am beginning to believe that this will never happen, and may take this
off our agenda unless I see some action.
TechnoRubble Supply
While we got through the Shelburne Maker Fair, we need more TechnoRubble. Two
local sources of TechnoRubble might someday be the ReStore and CVSWD. The
TechnoRubble untangling and packing is part of that effort.
TechnoRubble Taxonomy
Lets start with the hard part:A TechnoRubble Taxonomy
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/technorubble#TechnoRubbleTaxonomy. had some good
feedback about this issue. As the summer burns off I intend to tackle this,
using the framework developed in the Trantor project. This needs to be
reflected in the "unlikely candidate for software development" category above.
While at the Maker Fair, I Talked to Nick Floersch and the gang at the Code for
America Vermont brigade. Code For America Burlington appears to be Slack based,
and I clearly am not. The idea is to make TechnoRubble much more network
centric (after all what created most of the technorubble?) maybe get people to
mail their TechnoRubble to us in a USPS Flat Rate Box. Get TechnoRubbble
available on Amazon or Ebay! Not high priority, but could change...
The latest news is that we have the worlds cheapest RFID system, and may
try to include this into the TechnoRubble design...
Nick is also interested in the streambot, and interested in running
Minecraft on Raspberry Pies... These may become topics!
TRANTOR LLDD
As you know by now,LLDD stands for Local "Library Digital Destinations", and is
the real important part of this project. As of now the system is once again
100% operational. I had a chance to speak to Sarah, as I am most interested in
her help with both the trantor project and Library-based TechnoRubble.
Sarah the librarian indicated that there is new management (Scott Murphy) at
the State Library level and that they are hiring a technical coordinator who
can address Local Library Digital Destinations (LLDD), but this has not yet
happened.
Sarah also still wants a press release. I hope that the concept of Local
Library Digital Destinations has not been completely wiped out by entrenched
powers would so much prefer that to raise revenue by concentrating everything
in the very expensive DII Data Center at National Life, likely for a hefty
monthly fee! I may still do a press release, and after talking to her will no
doubt have a draft for her to review on the Trantor web site shortly. Sarah has
been busy, I may stop by and see how things are tomorrow.
Maybe we can crank out a press release before much longer.
The hard part of trantor turns out to be:
1. Getting a State bureaucracy to recognize
Free Open Source Software (what's in it for them?)
Could there be some action here finally?
2. getting the visual bash trantor prototype complete, with
appropriate features, which is done.
3. Adding the new elements to the collection...
Sadly, not much has changed here. Sent David Zukerman a note about this, but I
am not getting involved with State Gumment...
THE 2017 VISUAL BASH TOUR FROM HELL RESURRECTED?
Something called CPOSC... Watch this space. In first week of November...
PYTHON EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES
We will be scheming (no pun intended) to go (pun intended) forward with this
somehow.
LOFTIER EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES
Blockchain Tic-Tac-Toe
part of the SHARE conference is to reconnect and somehow figure out how to code
the transactions. This will be attached to the tic-tac-toe.py game. We have
decided on using python 3 for the first cut which merely involves writing a
simple tic-tac-toe game. Now get thinking!
see http://docbox.flint.com:8081/blockchain#blockchainttt
I am gonna continue this because it seems relevant.
Splunk
The BOSI web site "Classes" section has been updated to include educational
materials about Splunk, which we really need to start to use as a product.
In order to do this I need to get a tax ID number from the church. Wish
me luck.
Eric-the-Weasel is back and is making me feel very guilty... I propose we get
him to help us build a sample Splunk Server, as eventually I want to set up a
copy of Splunk here in the Casa Flint Network Kitchen. Maybe today. Watch this
space...
MAINFRAME ZLINUX
I will be going down to New York to hang with the Metropolitan VM Users
Association, Inc. (MVMUA) October 17th. Anyone who wants to come along is
welcome. If you want to play in this space, please let me know.
REXTRY
Now that the Maker Faire is over I am going to get back to this.
We actually got copy of the VM program RexTry running on the zPDT. Now I need
to figure out how to turn it on. I am almost ready to focus on this again,
just got to debug some Visual Bash, then I can get at this.
I also have a line on curl for VM. This is very cool.
TADA
Teleconferencing At Da AdultSwim (TADA) starts again at 6 PM EST today. I would
dearly love to know how to do more than one party, we like Joseph Hart but is
there more we can do? What about a Visual Bash or Termux interface to Google
Plus? Got to ask Joe.
Hopefully these will be discussed on:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/flint.com/tada
Topics for discussion as usual remain:
- Open Source Educational Human Development
I am working on the BBB and ... I am changing the priority of our
eternal needs, and placing education first.
- Maker Movement A Maker Space in Barre? Why not? We clearly have a
Maker Faire profile. Could it be that the commercial power centers
are beginning to appreciate the value of the maker movement.
See http://bbbvt.org/
Here are the city and statewide plans:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb
who has good ideas about a Barre Maker Space. Why not do digital
stone soup?
- Move BOSI towards reStructuredText. I am seriously researching a
tiddly2rest converter. This would allow us to become more git
centric... avoid the need to change to gittlywiki...
We still need to convert... Yea buddy... Shut up Effin.
- Blue Sky R&D, but in Vermont it will be Gun-metal Grey Sky(c) R&D
(GMGSR&D).
- I fought the DREK and the DREK continues to win. Remember, What
really is holds us back is DREK!!! DREK is what happens to your
workspace (both hardware and software) when you fail to put stuff
away, or you let your friends or relatives use it. This is a cosmic
law. I am still fighting the DREK. How to get over it? The secret
may be empty pellet bags. Is TechnoRubble organized DREK? Or is DREK
just what you get prior to something becoming TechnoRubble?
These five points are quickly becoming more than our policy, and more like a
prayer...
Anyway, we have the technology and we will have Pizza tonight 5-7 at Hedding
UMC.
This is the official notice of the Barre Open Systems Institute (BOSI) Adult
Swim. Accept no substitutes... For those coming in via the Google Plus and the
Internet, and there are folks who are gonna try, the swim stars at 6:00 PM EST.
Our ongoing major objective is to continue to try to figure out how to invest
the time and resources to turn the Barre Open Systems Institute into more than
just the Adult Swim technical clinic and more into a real learning facility,
and figure out where our good chairs went. One direction we have been working
on is to begin thinking about classes. The curriculum that I am most interested
in is teaching documentation.
The goal of the meeting shall be as usual, to get organized and try to get the
various projects moving forward, despite DREK. We continue to wonder about how
to build the BOSI curriculum to this webpage:
http://bosivt.org, works, and has just been updates see javascript link to
"classes"...
Remember, the BOSI Adult Swim is essentially about helping out fellow users of
open source products in a clinic environment. Despite my very best of
intentions, the Adult Swim is really almost a perpetual Linux install-fest, and
only secondarily a learning environment.
While we need to update this list soon, the ever growing list of projects (now
on our web site :^) includes:
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/vm - A Docker copy of VM370
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle - The Kindle Liberation Front
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/pyrs - A pythonic interface to Income Tax?
- http://ledroid.org - Ok, this is a real project eh?
- http://bzinga.net - What happens when you combine Bash and Zenity?
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/nodejs - ok, it is on the list.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/snobot - jesum they love this robot
- 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...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/raspberry - all versions
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/strembot.org - maybe a very cool project.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/organized - oh please let me be organized!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/music - this may be the least organized
site ever!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb - A big noble idea.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/grantbot - A less noble idea to feed the
big idea...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/gitlywiki - is tiddlywiki5 the answer?
This will be updated, hopefully two newsletters from now!
Otherwise, Barre indeed remains a great venue for a Linux and Open Source
Software discussion and general system rejuvenation. Expect to be remotely
preached at on the various topics of Open Source and how I am confident it
shall cure all the evils and ills of this wicked world. In a perfect meeting,
people would come in, sit down, see the stuff we have been doing and hopefully
help us get the DIY stuff we are doing done, or maybe just fix a laptop.
So, do not forget that the Barre library stocks "Linux Format", and the latest
issue is on the shelf, and it is good. The DVD's are available to checkout and
copy, we shall to continue provide copies and isos of each and every one. I am
continuing to duplicate about a years worth of DVD's which is quite a task. You
may want to watch this space for developments.
Anyway, come and do open source stuff. For more information about the BOSI
Adult Swim meeting time and location try this:
Directions to the Adult Swim:
http://docbox.flint.com:8080/bosivt.org/directions or, go to http://bosivt.org
and click on directions.
Show up at Hedding UMC if you have questions or are interested in Linux or the
concept of free and open systems. Again, we are in the basement of the Hedding
UMC facility which we like pretty well.
Somehow we need to make progress not more projects!!!
If you wish to be included on the "Linux_adult_swim" mailing list, send a
response to this note.
Join us in the heat this afternoon!
This is Flint signing off...
I will continue to refactor this newsletter, and at some point in the future
(do not hold your breath :^), it shall become readable!
I expect to hear from eagle eyed Dr. Mark, as he is our Honary Editor.
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
(802) 595-9365 Cell
/************************************
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://family.flint.com/flint
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
